This weekend is the arrival of our big upgrade to Campaign Monitor, which will include all the MailBuild goodies you love. See our previous post for all the details, but MailBuild will be offline starting 9pm on Friday 28th November (US Eastern standard time - see in your own time zone).

While the whole Freshview team is working on making sure this goes as smoothly as possible, here's a few things you could be doing to get ready:

• Let your clients (and team) know that MailBuild (and Campaign Monitor) will not be available over the weekend
• Check that you don't have campaigns scheduled during the downtime (or you don't mind them being sent once we are back)
• Set yourself a reminder to login on Monday morning to complete your account upgrade (set your new login URL and check your customization settings etc)

We know that downtime is never fun, so we appreciate your understanding and we think it will be worth the wait.

Getting updates:
If you use Twitter you can follow CampaignMonitor. We'll tweet updates about when the application is about to go offline, and when it is coming back.

The countdown to the new Campaign Monitor is on!

OK, so this isn't just big news, it's really really big news. In just under 2 weeks time, the entire MailBuild feature set will be merged with Campaign Monitor to create the ultimate email marketing application for designers. You can send campaigns for yourself, your clients and let your clients send their own campaigns, all from the same easy to use account. The best part is, you don't have to lift a finger. It's all being done for you behind the scenes.

What's new?

There's lots of great stuff packed into this upgrade, but here are a few of the highlights.

• Improved interface - We've made some big improvements across your account to make it easier to use and more powerful.
• Huge reporting overhaul - Your clients are going to love the new great looking reports that make it easier to see the numbers that matter.
• Full design and spam testing - Let your clients see screenshots of their campaigns in more than 20 email clients and run it through popular spam filters before they send. They can even pay for each test at a price you set.
• Import your own creative - On top of our template functionality, you can now import campaigns from the web or your own system with a single click.
• Google Analytics integration - Automatically tag links in your clients campaigns to track the visits, sales and conversions on their site.

How will this impact my clients?

Other than a shiny new interface, your clients won't notice much difference. We've worked hard to make this migration as smooth as possible and minimize any changes your client will experience. They'll still login from your site address (or your own web site) and all existing drafts, campaigns and lists will be right where they left them.

You might want to let your clients know they won't be able to login to their account over the weekend starting 9pm on Friday 28th November (US Eastern standard time - see in your own time zone). Everything else like subscribe forms and sent campaigns will still work behind the scenes, and they'll be able to login again on Monday December 1st.

See screenshots and learn more

Instead of packing every little detail into this blog post, we've we've put together a detailed preview site where you can read all about the updates and check out screenshots and screencasts of what's coming.

So what happens to MailBuild?

While the MailBuild brand will be gone, all the great features that you and more than 30,000 other customers rely on will live on within Campaign Monitor. Once we launch the new version, we'll be running everything from the new campaignmonitor.com web site, which will also be going live that day.

We're really happy with the finished product, and can't wait to see you guys using it.

As a designer, I used to say 'No!' to producing email newsletters - they always fell in the too hard basket for everyone involved.

For me, MailBuild has made the whole process uncomplicated, inexpensive & really, really easy. And now my clients can control the campaigns themselves, which they love. Hooray!

Adrianne Barba, bird.STUDIOS

If you have a Flash based site, and you'd like to have a newsletter signup inside your Flash pages, then the MailBuild API is the way to go.

Thanks to MailBuild customer Kuljit Athwal we now have a (partial) API sample in Action Script 3, in addition to the existing AS2 sample files.

You can grab both versions over at our API sample kits page. Great work Kuljit!

Users of the excellent content management system ExpressionEngine will be happy to see a new extension released a couple of days ago.

Developed by Stephen Lewis, the SL FreshView Subscribe extension "automatically subscribes newly registered (and confirmed) members to one or more MailBuild or Campaign Monitor lists".

This extension is free to download, and makes it super fast to integrate your email newsletters with your website members area (or for your ExpressionEngine using clients).

All you need to do is plugin your API key and ListID, and you can even register people into multiple lists at once. Thanks to Stephen for an excellent piece of work!

Check out the SL FreshView Subscribe extension in the ExpressionEngine forums now.

[UPDATE] Thanks for your patience, we are back up and running after successfully completing our maintenance.

Due to some maintenance requirements, we have scheduled an extended downtime period for MailBuild Saturday evening of the 13th, US Central time. We are specifying a total downtime of 6 hours overnight, but if all goes well expect MailBuild to be back sooner.

What does 'downtime' mean?

This maintenance period will have the following effects:

• You and your clients will not be able to login to MailBuild (or c/send.com)
• Campaigns scheduled to be sent during this period will not go out, but will be sent automatically as soon as the application comes back up.

However, subscribes and unsubscribes will be captured during the downtime, and processed into your reports afterwards. Campaigns sent previously will continue to display correctly, links will work and clicks and opens will be recorded correctly.

We will update this post if our plans change before Saturday, and also once the application is back up and running. Thanks in advance for your patience while we go through these maintenance periods.

Cameron Yule's Ruby Gem wrapper for the MailBuild API, which we mentioned in a recent post has just been updated. Cameron announced Version 1.1 on his blog which adds support for multiple subscriber lists.

Visit the MailBuild API documentation for links to all the API details.

The biggest challenge to great email design is inconsistency between email clients when they render HTML and CSS. To help save you a huge amount of time, hassle and possibly hair pulling, our support team guru Travis has coded up a huge selection of brand new MailBuild templates.

These templates are fully tested in all the major email clients from Outlook 2007, our old friend, to Thunderbird and Lotus Notes. While they won't appear exactly the same in all cases, you will see that they are very close in most cases, and will always look great.

In order to achieve this, we've had to make some compromises, and the code is a little more complex and less easily editable than before. However, you should still be able to grab these templates and make something awesome for your clients or even your own email campaigns.

Each template contains a version with all the relevant MailBuild tags built right in, including the new multiple repeater tags. You also get a copy of the original Photoshop file, so you can go in and change some of the graphical elements.

We think you'll find these new templates really useful, and visually appealing, so visit the templates page and have a look around!

It looks like Van Eldijk Studio's been busy making a slew of useful extensions for Joomla and low and behold, one of them is for MailBuild!

The extension makes it easy for anyone to add a subscribe form to your existing site without playing around with HTML. Add your MailBuild account details and you're good to go!

Added on July 30, this extension is still pretty new but we'd love to hear from some Joomla users who have tried it out.

You can read all about the extension and download it from here.

In case you haven't been keeping track this marks the third community created plugin for MailBuild (Drupal, Ruby Gem and Joomla) which is simply fantastic! Keep up the great work guys.

Super smart MailBuild user and Glasgow based developer, Cameron Yule has released the first version of his new MailBuild API interface for Ruby on Rails.

Cameron has all the details over on his site, and even includes an example Rails application that demonstrates the use of the new gem.

Great work Cameron! We always love to see people who are willing to share their work with other MailBuild users in this way, so if you've done something soimilar yourself, make sure you let us know.

Cameron's gem has been added to our MailBuild API documentation where it joins existing PHP and Flash API examples.

We've got some big plans for future improvements to the MailBuild API, but we're always interested in hearing what you think is important or could be useful too, so leave us a comment below.