New Terms of Service

We've posted new Terms of Service for Eyejot that took effect September 26, 2009. We encourage all our users to examine and read the online document. We have also replaced the link to our privacy policy that appeared at the bottom of all our web site pages with one to the new Terms of Service. You can now reach the privacy policy document through the TOS.

Deliverability enhancements for Eyejot messages

We have made some changes to our outbound email processing services this evening by adding DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) support. What this means, basically, is that our outbound email will now carry cryptographic headers that Yahoo and a few other ISPs recognize. They'll treat our email differently and try to deliver it more efficiently to their users. The crypto part means that they can be guaranteed that the email they receive from our servers is genuinely from us.

If you send Eyejots to friends or colleagues with Yahoo mail addresses please let us know if you discover your video mail getting delivered more reliably.

System maintenance and possible downtime

Our Internet bandwidth provider is performing maintenance on their long-haul fiber services that carry traffic between Seattle, WA and Sacramento, CA on September 4, 2009.

The work will be performed between Midnight, Pacific Time (-8GMT; 3AM Eastern Time) and 6AM, Pacific Time. An exact start time has not been provided to us but if an outage occurs it is supposed to be for less than one hour.

Audio review of Eyejot

Thanks to Twitter's search feature we discovered an audio review of Eyejot narrated by Peter Drew and posted by Randy Tyler. The seven minute program provides a useful and accurate overview of our video mail platform.

Eyejot introduces advanced custom templates

Eyejot, the web’s leading video mail solution, today announced an advanced template system for its PRO Plus users to control the presentation of video mail messages.

Eyejot’s new template manager allows its customers to create libraries of stylized designs that can be applied to video messages. This allows Eyejot users to create and send video mail that carries a look that’s complimentary to a marketing or sales initiative, or a product or company brand. What Eyejot has done is, basically, create an easy way to author and send video mail and to wrap various elements in a design that the customer controls.

This new template feature was created in response to customer demand for those users that have long valued Eyejot’s ability to send video mail and wanted a way to ensure that their own corporate branding was preserved, as well as giving them the chance to tie other important elements of their business into the video mail sent by Eyejot.

Eyejot users can created templates for email, message viewing and their own user pages.

ClickZ looks at Eyejot

Industry expert, founder and chief evangelist for Email Data Source Bill McCloskey wrote about Eyejot in a post made to ClickZ today. While describing some of successes and failures in the video mail space he wrote "tools like Eyejot are pretty exciting. Eyejot lets you create on the fly personalized video e-mails quickly and very cheaply."

MP4 downloading issue resolved

An alert user told us that they had been having problems downloading videos from their Eyejot inbox and we traced it to a bug we introduced a while ago. Suffice it to say, we've found and fixed the bug and everyone should be able save selected videos from their inbox to their computer. If you're not familiar with this feature, you can learn more about it here.

Although we test things out extensively and try to find and fix bugs before you see them, that's not always possible so we're grateful to those of you that take the time to alert us to any anomalies you discover.

Email to Comcast users not getting delivered

We've heard from some of our customers that notification messages destined for their Comcast mailboxes are not being delivered. We also heard from our friends at Amazon that they were having similar problems. And then additional confirmation came from the good folks at WhatCounts (one of the leading email service providers) that Comcast was using new filtering software from Cloudmark and was running into all sorts of problems.

For the sake of our customers we hope Comcast is able to improve their Cloudmark resources quickly. We'll continue to monitor things here. If you have any additional information or feedback you'd like to share with us, please send it to our support team through our contact page.

Planned maintenance alert

Eyejot's servers will experience between 5 and 10 minutes of downtime on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 6PM PDT. Our colocation facility is performing maintenance in an area that houses the optical fiber lines that provide our Internet service. The interruption is expected to be very brief.

Eyejot in The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal's Emily Steel mentioned Eyejot in her article Video Gets Entrée Into Email which was posted live today. The article primarily focused on Goodmail's recently announced product aimed at helping publishers get video players successfully placed and operational inside email messages.

This has long been a challenge for web-based email platforms. They have, for security and control reasons, intentionally stripped out HTML embed and object code, which is required to, for example, host a Flash player (or more nefarious playloads). So, the industry has reacted by either embedding static images that look like they're part of a movie and invite the reader to "click to view" or, more creatively, have utilized animated GIF images to expose some motion in the hopes of guaranteeing a "click to view."

The Goodmail solution is certainly interesting but it's primarily an agreement they've established with only a few ISPs. So their solution isn't universal. For us that's a problem. While it might be really cool to play video inside of an email message, unless it's a solution that can be used all the time, everywhere, it may ultimately be less effective than more traditional techniques.

Incidentally, Eyejot intends to offer an animated GIF option for its notification messages to PRO Plus members in the near future.