I really dig Seth Godin's marketing blog . It gives a detail-oriented programmer / marketing noob like myself the high-level view of marketing that I need to start thinking about things I normally don't. I also started making a couple of lenses over at Squidoo , a site Seth founded. I really like Squidoo, it's an awesome idea, and I'm surprised it isn't talked about more across the Web. I was just looking over my email though and I finally had a chance to check out my welcome email from Squidoo:

Unprofessional, and very disorganized right? The first thing I notice is that is was sent from Squidoo@staging1.squidoo.com . Are they sending welcome mail from their internal server? It certainly looks that way The second thing I noticed is that there is no formatting at all in the email. It looks like crap and gives me a headache - I still haven't read the whole thing.

This looks really bad considering it is supposed to be a "personalized" mail from the Editor in Chief! Most likely this is a coding mistake, or something being worked on accidentally found it's way to the live website. Anyway, I just wanted to share an example of how not to send email. Something like this won't discourage me from using Squidoo, but for some people it might, and it certainly discouraged me from reading it!

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