System errors?

System errors? Here's an interesting case from one of my earlier IT consultancies: The problem: For many years the company had sent out an email newsletter, text-only, with a substantial and growing subscription. Then suddenly subscribers started vanishing in droves. The challenge: find out why. Was it a system error, a virus, they'd had turned the IT department upside down and found nothing. The answer: Marketing had discovered PDFs, with images and hyperlinks and whizzy things, and redid the newsletter into a full hyper-linked system without telling the newsletter writers. This had taken the email from 10K to 2MB, because obviously since they could open it on their PCs, so could everyone else... The moral: Make sure you know what your audience wants  (and that interactive PDFs can get blocked by firewalls that let plaintext emails through). Read more. This blog has moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial where the original articles can be found.