Pictures in press releases?

[techbear]

In the past, I've sent out the standard press release format, like:

Avelia Pet Adventures goes open BETA!

Austin, TX - Aggressive Game Designs has now moved to open BETA for it's new pet-raising MMOG.

Avelia Pet Adventures is a free and unique massively-multiplayer adventure for the PC. Made especially for DirectX-enabled machines, Avelia Pet Adventures lets you design, breed, and raise your own pets. You can trade your pet designs, play mini-games with your pets, and collect magic flowers.
Avelia Pet Adventures uses a high-res screen and hardware acceleration to achieve amazing effects. The official website is http://www.aggressivegames.com/avelia.htm

But a LOT of e-mail I receive contains imbedded images, leading me to wonder:

Could I enhance a press release by adding an image to it? A screenshot, or the game's logo?

Or would such an e-mail be filtered, or poorly received?

[SoftPressRelease]

In the past, I've sent out the standard press release format, like:

Could I enhance a press release by adding an image to it? A screenshot, or the game's logo?

Or would such an e-mail be filtered, or poorly received?

Hello,

Some of our customers prefer to have their press releases formatted and containing images. We tried to somehow measure the difference between the editors' response rate to html press releases and plain text ones, but it doesn't seem any significant.

Plain text is considered standard though. It's true that some editors don't accept e-mails containing any attachment or exceeding a certain size, some magazines have a special note about this on their websites. So i would recommend you a plain text press release with a link referring to a webpage with all your graphics available for the press or direct links to screenshots and pictures.

Best of luck,
Evgenia Kolobukhova
SoftPressRelease.com - press release distribution to game-centered media
info@SoftPressRelease.com
http://www.SoftPressRelease.com/

[Bad Sector]

In my email i have all images disabled in HTML. 99.9% of all the HTML mail i get is junk, spam and stuff like that. I'm considering to redirect all HTML mail in my junk folder which i check once per week or less (the only thing that stops me actually is that i need to figure out how to do that :-P).

Personally i don't like HTML email. All they add is a variable-width font, the ability to spam me to hell, download extra stuff i won't like, eat more space in my mail server and beyond that i can't use a terminal-based email client. In some cases the encoding or mime type is set incorrectly and my standard web-based client cannot read it, so i have to use Thunderbird which takes some time to get loaded. Or not loaded at all in my ancient laptop, from where my only option is using the terminal...

Really, what's wrong with plain ASCII?

[Greg Miller]

In my email i have all images disabled in HTML. 99.9% of all the HTML mail i get is junk, spam and stuff like that. I'm considering to redirect all HTML mail in my junk folder which i check once per week or less (the only thing that stops me actually is that i need to figure out how to do that :-P).


My thunderbird installation's bayesian spam filtering tends to send HTML emails straight to the Junk folder, since almost all previous HTML emails I've received have been spam.

[Roman Budzowski]

My thunderbird installation's bayesian spam filtering tends to send HTML emails straight to the Junk folder, since almost all previous HTML emails I've received have been spam.

You'll be surprised how many corporate people sends HTML emails. It not good for you to send them to the Junk folder :D Unless you don't work with corporate people then you don't need to worry about it.

best
Roman

[Tom Ohle]

We tend to send out press releases with embedded images -- usually to show the product box shot or the client's logo -- but those do run a higher risk of getting snapped up by spam filters. If you want to make sure you're hitting everyone you're targeting, go with image-free releases.

[Greg Miller]

You'll be surprised how many corporate people sends HTML emails. It not good for you to send them to the Junk folder :D Unless you don't work with corporate people then you don't need to worry about it.

best
Roman

I review the junk folder before deleting the contents to see if any of the senders or subject lines look like legit mail. But there's not really any way to stop bayesian filtering systems from marking HTML mail as spam as long as over 99.9% of the HTML mail I receive actually is spam. It sees all the HTML tags as high probability spam markers.

And I can't afford to turn spam filtering off. I get something like 1000 spams and a small handful of legit emails each day, not counting what gets filtered at the SMTP server. I can barely use email anymore as is.