If you’ve seen those bumper stickers encouraging you to honk your car’s horn if you agree with the bumper sticker’s sentiments (“Honk if you like popcorn” for example), then you probably hate more than just spam. You probably hate traffic.

Assuming you do hate traffic, do you go around telling people this? Or, knowing you’re not the only one do you just go about your day?

Saying “I hate spam” on your website’s subscribe form as a way to help people feel safe giving you their email addresses just plain doesn’t make sense. It’s sort of like saying you hate traffic.

This is embarrassing. But, it fits so well with today’s topic, that I’m going to share it with you anyway.

I was a very, very bossy kid. And I have a younger brother who was very easy to boss around.

He’s two years younger than I am and didn’t talk all that much (he didn’t have to…)

Last week, we talked about the “dirty elephant” that is Outlook and other popular email programs.

This week, we’re going to take a look at the things you can do to work around them, as much as possible.

On Monday morning, Robert (with his permission, that’s actually his real name) emailed me, upset. He’d just seen his newsletter at a client’s office and wanted to know what was going on. “The pictures were broken,” he said. “And they’d been replaced with a message about privacy.”

After a bit of discussion, it became clear: Robert had never seen what his newsletter looked like by default in Outlook.

Because he used Outlook himself, he’d seen how other peoples’ newsletters looked. But he’d always assumed other publishers had done something wrong and that his newsletter looked “right” for everyone.