*|RSS:RECENT|* 

This will tell MailChimp to insert links to your 5 most recently published articles from your blog. 

If you want, you can hack that merge tag a little bit like this:

*|RSS:RECENT10|*

to insert links to the 10 most recent articles instead.

Just add a little snippet of JavaScript code to your web page, and we’ll display an automatically updating count of your subscribers.

Before, if your recipients hovered their mouse over those links, they’d see MailChimp’s domains (actually, we made them look pretty generic, like “foward-to-friend.com” or list-manage.com).

Some people told us they were too generic, and some others (really paranoid people) told us they looked a little suspicious. Good point. So we changed them to automatically include your own company name in front, as a subdomain. It’s a nice little touch to help make your emails look even more professional and trustworthy.

We’ve also re-designed the MonkeyRewards Dashboard that’s in your MailChimp account, so you can get better insight into just how much monkey love you’re spreading. Click on the thumbnail to zoom in on the screenshot. Enhancements include:

1. Credits Earned box, showing you how much credit you’ve earned this month, and in total
2. Inbox Inspections Earned box, showing you how many inbox inspections you’ve earned this month and in total
3. Email Notification option, which will send you an email whenever you’ve earned rewards
4. Refer-ee List, showing you how many of your friends signed up
5. Rewards Applied list, which details how you’ve spent all those credits you’ve earned

The MonkeyRewards program is really easy. All you have to do is add a little MailChimp badge to your email campaign, and/or your signup forms. Some people have been adding it to their websites, even. And that’s all you have to do. We’ll track all clicks from the badge, so we can reward you automatically. Plus, the badges don’t suck. Besides, admit it—you’ve been looking for some excuse to include a monkey somewhere in your email campaigns. Now you can earn rewards for it!

In MailChimp v3.2, which is going live on August 11th, the entire opt-in process built into MailChimp will be available in 16.5 different languages:

By the way, that “16.5″ is not a typo. See, one of the “pseudo” languages we’ve added is Chimplish...And unfortunately, Chimplish is not (yet) available in Google Translate. So in order to add Chimplish to our supported languages, our lead engineer Chad spent countless hours listening to archived chimpanzee recordings, re-runs of Wild Kingdom, and an old VHS tape of Every Which Way But Loose, set on infinite repeat.He ate nothing but bananas, nuts, and ants for weeks, and he slowly began to decode the simple yet elegantly sophisticated language of chimpanzees. It wasn’t easy, considering there are apparently at least 32 different dialects of Chimplish, each with their own type of slang (we went with East Coast Chimplish, because we felt West Coast Chimplish was too “stuck up”). There’s a picture of Chad above, just before he went insane. We last saw him scurrying out the door on all fours, and we haven’t seen him since.By the way, you don’t wanna know what Jesse, our API Engineer, did to learn LOLCODE.

Don’t see your language on the list? Post a comment below, and we’ll get it added.

At MailChimp, we’ve had to shut down quite a few creative agencies for their client’s bad email habits. Sadly, most problems could have been easily prevented.

We’ve posted a free PDF guide (9 pages): Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming.

The free downloadable guide covers how to tell if your client is crossing the line, and how to gently guide them back over from the dark side (without losing the project). More specifically, we go over:

• The most common reasons we’ve had to shut down agency accounts at MailChimp
• The industries (your clients) that always seem to have the most risk (and why)
• How to define spam in words your client will understand, and how to determine when a client just needs a punch in the gut
• How to detect inexperienced clients who may be doing things to get themselves (and you) in trouble

We’ve joined the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance, alongside companies like Bank of America, IronPort, Verisign, ReturnPath, and Symantec.

The AOTA works hard to promote the widespread use of email authentication, in order to keep email safe. If you don’t know what authentication is, it’s basically a way to show your email is not a forgery. This helps you get through some spam filters, and lets your customers know your email’s authentic. Big ISPs have been hinting that one day, they’ll throttle or block non-authenticated emails. MailChimp comes with authentication built-in, and we include multiple authentication formats (DKIM, SenderID, SPF, and Domain Keys)

Why’d we join the AOTA? Three reasons:

1. More email service providers (ESPs) need to join, to help determine standards. Authentication is different when you’re one big bank sending transactional emails, versus an ESP sending millions of emails a day on behalf of thousands of different customers. If ESPs don’t join in the discussion, our customers could suffer.
2. Look at the ginormous companies on that members list. Who’s representing small business? Reputable email campaigns aren’t just for ginormous global corporations, you know.
3. As authentication technology changes, we want to be the first to know, so that our customers’ campaigns get delivered.

Here’s an example:

and a tribute to lolcats:

What’s really creepy is I got a haircut yesterday, then logged in and got this:

How’d we do that? Perhaps the engineers are playing pranks on me.

Anyway, if you’ve got an idea for a random MailChimp welcome message, post a comment below. We’ll plug it into the interface. We’ve got customers from all over the world, so personally, I’d love it if we could get some local attitude in there.

If you’re using MailChimp’s managed lists, we automagically clean hard bounces from your list immediately, to prevent this sort of thing. If you manage your list by hand in some excel file, and you manually remove bounces and unsubscribes “whenever you can get to them,” you’re going to have problems (and not just with AOL).  If you’re sending your very first email campaign to an old list you’ve been collecting for years, you should remove any contacts older than 1 year, and then send your campaign in small chunks.

On a related note, here are “average email bounce rates by industry.”

Also, the new MailChimp reports will show you what your bounce rate is by ISP: