Email From Line Length

Justin Premick recently posted something that I just shared with our resident email guru, Morgan, who sends all of our company emails and newsletters.

It is about email from line subject length…in other words, your name or company name or name of the newsletter.? Mine, for example, is “Matt McWilliams.”? A recent newsletter I got came from “Affiliate Marketing Professionals Group Members” which showed up as “Affiliate Marketing Prof.” in my email box.

Different email clients allow a different number of characters in their from lines, ranging from 21 (Windows Live Hotmail OSX) to at least 32 (Outlook 2007 and Mozilla Thunderbird).

Yahoo displays 22 characters, GMail shows 24 characters on both XP and OSX, and Live Hotmail shows 23 in XP.? AOL Webmail allows 24 and the iPhone 20. GMail on the Android phone shows only 24.

So, what to do about this exactly?? Well, my personal opinion is that you should target using a maximum of 22 characters since that will show all of them on 99% of emails clients.? Of course, it should be something that is recognizable and easy to read.? Make sure that if they signed up for the “Guitar Players News” newsletter that they are getting the email from “Guitar Players News” not “Super Duper Guitar Site.”

Keep it simple, keep it short, and keep it consistent!

You can read Justin’s post here.