Experiencing “Slow Image Load Times”?

When viewing any email message, Outlook will usually perform multi-thread content loading (many images loading at once), but sometimes Outlook will perform single-thread content loading (one image loading at a time). How will this affect your PoliteMail tracked messages?

For every PoliteMail tracked messaged, PoliteMail will supply a unique “time to read” based on the number of words Outlook counts and how many images and links are placed within a message. PoliteMail places a read-time image in the body of your PoliteMail tracked message that will take 150% of that supplied “time to read” to load completely. If for some reason, Outlook performs single-thread content loading, since Outlook randomizes the order in which images load, some images placed in the body of the message may not load until that read-time image has been completely loaded. This creates the effect of some images being temporarily broken (grey box in Outlook) or not loading at all.

This is an Outlook bug/feature that will switch Outlook behavior to perform single-thread content loading and it causes email recipients to experience “slow image load times” when users send PoliteMail tracked messages. In PoliteMail v4.6, we offer a solution for this Outlook bug.

Typically, updates to our software require no additional action. However, for users experiencing this “slow image load time” an additional set up requirement will mitigate if not eliminate this behavior in PoliteMail v4.6.

Corporate Cloud Hosted Clients:

To enable this feature, you’ll need to work with PoliteMail to update to PoliteMail v4.6. Once you have updated to PoliteMail v4.6 we can enable this setting for you on the server side.

You’ll need to:

1). Add the PoliteMail Server image host name (given to you from your account manager) to your organization’s Trusted Sites via GPO push

On-Premise Clients:

To enable this feature, PoliteMail will require a secondary “image” host name for the PoliteMail server to be added to your organization’s Trusted Sites via GPO push. Typically, this image host name will be similar to your current PoliteMail host name.

You’ll need to:

1). Create a secondary DNS entry for the PoliteMail Server image host name

2). If not using a wildcard DNS, add another SSL certificate for the PoliteMail Server image host name to the certificate store on the PoliteMail application server

3). Add the PoliteMail Server image host name to Trusted Sites via GPO Push  

Example:

PoliteMail Server Host Name: company.pmail5.com

PoliteMail Server Image Host Name: company-image.pmail5.com

By adding this secondary image host name to Trusted Sites, the read-time image will resolve to the image host name, so regardless of Outlook’s single or multi-thread content loading the read-time image, users will no longer experience “slow image load times”.

Disabling ScreenTips in Outlook

The Problem: When hovering your mouse over an actionable item in Outlook, a contextual mini-window, known as a ScreenTip, appears which will open Outlook Help if clicked. This can be annoying.

To disable ScreenTips within Outlook, simply go to File > Options and change the ScreenTip style setting to “Don’t show ScreenTips“, then click OK.

ScreenTips will no longer appear.

Best Practices for Sending a Tracked Email with Links

Inserting links into your communications is a great way to include more information in your message without increasing the size of your send. The most common methods are manually typing or copying and pasting the link into the body of your message, or using Outlook’s Insert Hyperlink.

When PoliteMail tracking is enabled, PoliteMail encodes any link’s URL with a page ID and a reference ID that is unique to each recipient. This ensures that link clicks are being tracked and accounted for in any metrics reporting. The results may be viewed in the Results Library.

Here’s a list of best practices for sending a tracked email with links

1). Make sure the link is valid with appropriate protocols such as http, https, or www.

2). When creating a template for shared use, ensure that the links you are including in the template are also valid.

3). To re-use successful links you’ve used in previous sends, utilize the PoliteMail Links button. However, be wary of any invalid links that may have been stored in your PoliteMail Links. Manage Links through the Content Library.

4). When copying and pasting links from another source, make sure there are no spaces copied before or after the link. Any spaces will result in a broken link.

5). When typing the link into the body of your message, make sure you press Enter or Space afterwards so that Outlook may automatically create a hyperlink for it. When this is not done, PoliteMail can’t pick up that it is a link, so no page ID or reference ID is applied and the link will not be tracked.

Responsive Behavior Outlook 2013 – Images enlarged

Responsive Mis-Behavior in Outlook 2013

With the May 2015 update to Microsoft Office 2013, there has been a change in how web-referenced and embedded images are rendered in Outlook.

This change has resulted in abnormal responsive behavior of PoliteMail templates.

When you paste images into Outlook, or use Outlook’s Insert Picture tool, the images will be embedded into the message content. This means the file size increases with the image size, and the images will actually display as file attachments when sent to non-Outlook email programs.

When using PoliteMail > Add Image, you have the option (PoliteMail > Settings > Preferences > [ ] Embed Images with Message) of hosting the images instead, which reduces email file size by putting the images on the PoliteMail Server for your account and referencing them in the HTML code.

For some reason, Outlook will now expand embedded images to 100% of the outside container size, whereas referenced images are display at 100% of the actual size at most. The net result is embedded images will appear too large.

To prevent this behavior, using referenced images, or change the Alt tag in the image to prevent PoliteMail from making the images responsive (to the display container).

Select the image in the email, then right-click and select Format Picture or select Outlook Picture Tools > Expand the Format Styles menu (lower right icon).

Now click the Layout and Properties icon and expand the ALT TEXT option, and remove the mo_re100% text if you do not want PoliteMail to enable responsive images, or add it into the alt text if you do.

How to Change Smart Attachments – v4.5

To change a Smart Attachment that you sent in a message, follow the steps below.

Upload the new, corrected Smart Attachment. To Upload go to Content>Smart Attachments>New.

Delete the Smart Attachment you want to replace by selecting it in your Content Library then clicking on the X.

Go back to the new Smart Attachment and click Edit>Change the name to that of the original Smart Attachment that you just deleted.

The link in the message will now redirect to the new Smart Attachment.

Geographic Location Data

PoliteMail Geographic Reporting

PoliteMail v4.5 will now convert recipient IP address information into geographic data, so you may view a map of your open and click interactions. This map view enables drill-down to a city level view.

In anonymous and aggregate tracking modes, PoliteMail will store the longitude and latitude data from the IP conversion using the IP/Geographic database, but will not store the IP.

Note: There is a current issue with load-balanced accounts running on the Amazon EC2 platform, whereas the load balancer does not pass through the original IP, resulting in all traffic appearing on the Map as-if it were occurring from one location (the server location). We are currently working to resolve this issue.

PoliteMail v4.5 now includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com.

The GeoLite2 databases are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Contacting Support

Contacting Support

If you are experiencing technical issues with your PoliteMail account, please reach out to our server support team.

In your main PoliteMail tab, click on the Request Support icon.

 

Clicking on the Request Support icon will generate an email with your account information and an error log that will aid our server support team in troubleshooting the issue. Enter a brief synopsis of the issue you are experiencing and add screenshots if applicable.

Once you send the message, a support case will be automatically created for your request and our support team will respond.

You can also reach out directly to our support team via:

Email: serversupport@politemail.com

Phone: (603)-610-6111 ext. 3

Is PoliteMail compatible with a Mac?

Use of PoliteMail requires the Windows desktop version of PoliteMail. PoliteMail does not work with Outlook online/Office 365, or with Office for Mac. Microsoft does not support any add-ins for Office for Mac.

Images not scaling within templates

If you are using a PoliteMail template and images are not scaling while the text and table are, you can use the mo_re100% fix that allows the images to scale with text and table.

To fix, add “mo_re100%” (without quotes) to the alt text of the image. Right click the image and click format picture (screen shot from Outlook 2013).

This instructs PoliteMail to change the image height to “auto” and the width to “100%” during sending (something you can’t do in Outlook). The effect is that the images will scale with the table they are inserted in.

Why didn't my send go out to all the recipients of my distribution group, just part of it?

Why did only a partial list receive my email when it all shows in my sent items?

This problem is typically one of three issues which may occur when running Exchange 2010:

1) The user (or PoliteMail Service Account “user”) does not have adequate permissions to expand or send to the list

Symptoms: The user can successfully send to the list without PoliteMail, but NO mail is sent when using PoliteMail.

Resolution: Have your Exchange Admin ensure the PoliteMail Service Account has adequate permissions to expand and send to the desired distribution group.

2) The Exchange server-side throttling policy is impacting the ability of PoliteMail to perform the list expansion, especially when the distribution list > 5,000 recipients

Symptoms: When the user sends a tracked PoliteMail message, only part of the list gets sent to.

Resolution: The root cause of this issue is the server-side throttling policy on Exchange. When the PoliteMail Server attempts to expand a large distribtuion group, Exchange settings prevent that spike of activity. Specifically the list expansions query takes too much time to access Active Directory Domain Services (or Exchange/AD is otherwise too busy to respond in time). The problem can be avoided by increasing the RCAPercentTimeInAD parameter to a larger value by using the Set-ThrottlingPolicy cmdlet as detailed in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598291. If adjusting the throttling policy on Exchange is not possible, there is an Outlook 2010 hotfix package available for download from Microsoft.

3) A bug in Exchange 2010 results in partial sends (sometimes/inconsistently) when using PoliteMail

Symptoms:
When sending to an Outlook distribution group, only part of the list recieves the email, the remainder are never actually sent, despite PoliteMail recording the total number sent, and showing the email in Sent Items.

Please note that this error does not occur on every send, but randomly, depending upon the conditions of Exchange Server 2010 at the time of the send.

Resolution:
This problem can be fixed by applying the Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 (information link only, not the actual update)

If you are unable to update your Exchange Server, PoliteMail offers a client hot-fix version which includes a work-around to this Exchange bug, and will enable the full send to go out.

In the first quarter of 2013 PoliteMail received a number of customer inquiries regarding partial sends, for users sending via the Outbox as well as via the Server using Active Directory distribution groups. Upon investigation, the common element was Exchange 2010 sp2, but the problem did not occur every time, however when it did occur, ‘buffer exception’ errors where logged.

Cause

The PoliteMail for Outlook add-in is a multi-threaded MAPI application that requests data from Exchange Server 2010.

Due to a bug in Exchange 2010, the PoliteMail MAPI application encounters MAPI_E_CALL_FAILED errors. Additionally, the Microsoft.Exchange.RpcClientAccess.BufferTooSmallException error is logged in the C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerV14LoggingRPC Client Access server.

When sending via the Outbox, PoliteMail would be unable to report this error. When sending via the Server, the user would see a dialog showing the MAPI_E_CALL_FAILED error, and by clicking OK, PoliteMail would continue processing but would have lost some of the recipients as a result.

For more information read:

Member names are not displayed in a distribution list in Outlook 2010

MAPI errors occur when an Outlook 2007/2010 MAPI application tries to access an Exchange Server 2010 server

Random MAPI_E_CALL_FAILED errors in Exchange Server 2010