Category: Product Updates

We’ve been notified that AOL has recently made some updates to their system and is doing a little Spring Cleaning!   In a nutshell AOL is going to be cancelling some inactive mailboxes.  These are mailboxes that have been abandoned by users but still receive mail.  As we all know mailing bulk mail to inactive addresses is a good way to invite email delivery problems into your Marketing house.  So AOL is doing everyone a favor by eliminating ‘some’ of these inactive addresses on their end.  They could easily turn them into Spamtraps and really put a hurtin’ on honest email marketers but they have decided to simply delete these mailboxes (Thank you AOL!).

As a result, we at mobileStorm are going to be making changes on our end to remove these addresses from your email lists.  Customers may notice an increase in AOL Hard Bounces next time they send an email campaign and it’s possible that overall Active subscriber counts will see a slight decrease as well.  Unfortunately mobileStorm has no further information on exactly how many AOL mailboxes will  be removed on their end.   Please rest assured that this will only benefit your email marketing efforts moving forward.

Changes will be happening starting Friday 7/9 and should subside once all bad addresses have been removed from your lists. How frequently mobileStorm customers send email campaigns to their entire database will determine how long this ‘inactive mailbox removal’ process will last.  If any customers have any questions about this please feel free to call us at 1.866.492.7886 (press 2) or email us at support@mobilestorm.com or hit us up in Live Chat from inside the mS system.

From AOL Postmaster:

As part of the migration to the new email architecture, some inactive mailboxes are being canceled. Our sender reputation systems were adjusted prior to this change so that the increase in invalid recipients would not negatively impact mailers.  Please follow your normal procedures for removing accounts that repeatedly return as invalid.

mobileStorm is excited to announce the addition of mobile applications as an add-on for PRO customers seeking quick entrance into the exploding mobile apps space.

With the addition of mobile apps, PRO customers can quickly and seamlessly introduce a branded iPhone/iPod Touch app featuring any content distributed through their existing RSS feeds.  In addition, mobileStorm streamlines the process, meaning your mobile app can be built, tested and submitted to Apple’s App Store in a matter of days, not weeks or months.  Our dedicated staff holds your hand throughout the entire process, ensuring a quick and painless process of getting your branded mobile app out the door so you can reap the benefits.

Some core features of our new mobile app offering include;

• Full compatibility with iPhone and iPod Touch, including full inclusion to Apple’s App Store .
• The ability to easily add news content, calendar events, various Web content, and blog posts.
• The ability to automatically add content from existing feeds including RSS, Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Flikr, and more directly into your mobile app.
• The ability to edit artwork and change your app at anytime.
• The option to search for additional content that may not be specific to your own brand and co-publish it in your app.
• The ability to easily customize the look and feel of your app.

Mobile apps are available now to all PRO customers.  Learn more here, or schedule a demo to see what our creative expertise can do for you!

As part of the continued evolution of our product offerings, we’re always looking for ways to enhance usability.  As such, we’ve made a small change to the “delete” function pertaining to rows of data.

On all pages where a list of records is displayed, we’ve removed the Delete button from the individual rows.  Users can still delete an item by checking the checkbox and then clicking ‘Delete Selected’.

The following sections are affected by this update;

• My Lists
• My Forms
• My Campaigns
• My Subscribers
• Targets

The change comes as we follow the usability principal that dangerous actions should not be easy to perform.  Placing the delete button on each individual row may cause users to accidentally delete valuable information.  By creating one extra step, it ensures any data that’s deleted was truly meant to be removed.

We at mobileStorm are always busy bringing you the latest and greatest in terms of features and functionality, and today we’re happy to announce that we’ve added a new feature: SMS bounce reports.

The new feature breaks down SMS campaign bounces by type and carrier, giving you a better understanding of how and why your SMS messages aren’t being delivered.  More information is provided about the exact subscribers who bounced by clicking on “View Details.”

Various bounce types are returned based on specific reasoning, including:

• Hard — The cell phone number no longer exists on that carrier
• Soft — A soft bounce is when the carrier’s message queue is full at the time of delivery.  The cell phone number is still valid, it just couldn’t be delivered at this time.
• On Blocklist — The cell phone number is on a carrier blocklist and cannot be delivered.
• Spam — Your SMS campaign was considered spam, and as a result, was rejected by the carrier.
• Unknown — The carrier replied back with an “unknown” reason for the delivery of this message.

The new feature is available now for all current mobileStorm clients.  If you’re not a client, we encourage you to take a look at what mobileStorm can do for your business by going one-on-one with one of our marketing specialists.

We’re always working with our clients to bake more goodies into mobileStorm Go and Pro to fully optimize the user experience. Every feature request means an opportunity to make our product more powerful and boost campaign performance.

We’ve just added some new features to mobileStorm that our users have been asking for and here they are:

• You can now view Delivery Confirmation Receipts for all carriers in your SMS delivery report

• Any failed MT (Mobile Terminated) SMS Messages will now show in your SMS delivery report

• See the exact date and time that SMS messages have been sent when you export your SMS Inbox

• You can now expand parent email events in “email campaigns” to see the individual “recurring” scheduled events

We’ve also broadened our carrier reach adding Cellular South and nTelos to the list of carriers our clients can text through. This increases potential audience reach by over 5 million people.

We continue to upgrade our product on an ongoing basis to ensure that all our client’s needs are met.

If you’re a client you can benefit from all the most recent updates now. If not, we encourage to go one-on-one with our marketing professionals and take us for test drive at http://www.mobilestorm.com/pro/schedule-demo/.

Until our next update . . . it’s back to the kitchen to keep perfecting our recipe.

All the best,

The mobileStorm Team