Reverse chronological order: between Twitter, RSS feeds, and activity streams, we have been trained to expect information in order from newest to oldest. For consistency, tweetymail has always displayed newer tweets before older tweets in the emails it sends. However, this is not always the easiest way to read an email - especially if you are trying to catch up with your timeline. I myself usually scroll directly to the bottom of the email and start from there.

Today, we added a setting for you to choose how you want tweets to be ordered in the emails you receive from tweetymail. If you like having your tweets ordered the way they are on the Twitter website - in order from newest to oldest - then you don't have to change anything. On the other hand, if you would rather see tweets in the order they were posted - in order from oldest to newest - you can toggle a setting in your tweetymail account. Here is how you can change the setting:

1. Sign-in to http://tweetymail.com/signin
2. On the Email Addresses tab, click the General Settings link
3. Under "Tweet ordering", select the order in which you want tweets to be displayed
4. Click the Save Settings button

---

---

This new setting is available to all users and affects all emails sent by tweetymail that contain tweets. And wait... there's more!

Each time you use latest@tweetymail.com, you can indicate the order in which you want your tweets returned. You can do this by specifying the number of tweets in the body (as usual) and then making that number either positive or negative. If the number is positive (or if you omit the number entirely), your tweets will be ordered according to the "Tweet ordering" setting described above. If the number is negative, however, it will order tweets in the opposite direction as your setting. For example, if you keep the default "Tweet ordering" setting (newest to oldest), a value of 20 will return 20 tweets in order from newest to oldest. Sendng an email to latest@tweetymail.com with a value of -20, on the other hand, will return 20 tweets in order from oldest to newest.

I hope you find this new feature useful! I know the part about latest@tweetymail.com is a bit confusing (we'll try to update the user guide soon!), so please ask if you need a clarification.

Some of you have configured rules in your email client to automatically forward emails to tweetymail. In general, this is not a problem. In fact - it's neat to see tweetymail used to automate certain tasks like tweeting Google Calendar reminders.

However, it has come to our attention that some users have configured some... "not so smart"... forwarding rules. For example, you should not forward emails that come from tweetymail right back to tweetymail! tweetymail might send you emails for a variety of reasons: your tweet failed, Twitter is down, we have an announcement to make, etc. Creating a forwarding rule that blindly forwards emails right back to the sender is a really bad idea! We also see other emails being forwarded to us that are clearly not intended to be posted on Twitter.

It's great to see how much our users love creating email alerts. We take pride in providing fast and frequent alerts and dedicate a large percentage of system resources to supporting this feature. As a consequence, though, we have to be careful with alerts and ensure that we enforce the necessary constraints.

One constraint that we've had in place for some time is that FREE users are only allowed to create a combined total of two email alerts. Although we want our FREE users to experience the benefits of the different types of alerts, we don't want to open the flood gate on a feature without being able to support it.

One reason that we are creating the FULL access subscription model is to be able to support higher usage for users who want it. Users who subscribe to FULL access will not be subjected to the same constraints as our FREE users. Unfortunately, we overlooked the group of users currently taking part in the free preview of FULL access. Our intention was to continue to limit everyone to a combined total of two email alerts. However, until today, users previewing FULL access were able to exceed the limit.

We want to make you aware that the limit of two alerts is back in effect. For the near feature, users who have created more than two alerts will be able to use and retain all of their existing alerts, but will not be able to add any more alerts (unless enough alerts are removed first). When the preview period ends, and we launch the subscription model, users who subscribe to the service will continue to retain their alerts and will be granted full capabilities. Users who do not subscribe at that time will likely have their excess alerts disabled or removed.

We apologize for any confusion and hope you understand our need to maintain the alert limit during this preview period. Please let us know if you have questions or concerns.

As some of you might have already noticed, we rolled out a new enhancement today. Now when you receive an email containing tweets -  such as a mentions alert or a response from latest@tweetymail.com - certain content within each tweet is automatically hyperlinked. This content includes:

1. URLs - all URLs within tweets are now explicitly treated as links. While many email clients already treat URLs as links, this change ensures that every HTML-capable email client will allow you to click on the URLs.
2. Usernames - all @username occurrences inside tweets are now clickable too. Clicking on an @username launches the profile of that user on the Twitter website. This feature is for FULL access users only.
3. Hashtags - all hashtags insides tweets are now clickable too. Clicking on a hashtag launches a search for that hashtag on the Twitter website. This feature is for FULL access users only.

Here is an example:

Our goal is to make the tweets that are delivered to your inbox as useful as possible. We hope that these additional links will make it easier to look-up information and gain better context around the tweets that interest you. This is an experimental feature and we are interested in knowing how well it works. Are these links helpful? Do you mind navigating to the Twitter website? Perhaps in the future these links can provide more powerful and useful actions. Let us know your thoughts!

We're back from our break and ready to roll out some new enhancements!
We really appreciate your feedback over the last few weeks.

To make things easier, we now have a dedicated support community for
questions, issues, and suggestions. You can visit it here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/tweetymail

You will notice new links on the tweetymail website to this support
community as well as a prominent feedback tab when you are logged in
to your tweetymail account.

Please take advantage of this community and help us build an even better service!

The last few weeks have been pretty action-packed! It's been amazing to see how many new users have tried tweetymail and discovered how incredibly convenient email integration with Twitter can be. We've worked hard to ensure that we maintain the quality of the service while accomodating the increased usage.

Now it's time to breathe. I'm about to board a flight to go on a vacation that was planned long ago. Don't worry - we'll continue to monitor things and make sure your questions are answered. Aside from that, though, don't be surprised if we're a bit quiet for these next two weeks.

Towards the end of the month, you can count on a bunch of improvements and features. In the meantime, feel free to leave comments on this post with your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions. I'm counting on you to make sure we have lots of fun stuff to work on when I return.

Everyone has a bad day. Today was ours. At around 7:30pm EDT an issue in our database corrupted the settings for all "Tweets" alerts. We immediately suspended all "Tweets" and "Mentions" alerts and started working on recovering the data.

I am relieved to report that we were able to recover the vast majority (99%+) of data and have resumed all alerts. However, you might notice the following side effects as a result of this issue:

• The first alert you receive might contain tweets that you already received earlier today. We tried to ensure that no tweets are missing from the downtime period, but there is a slight possibility of that occurring as well.
  
• If you made changes to the filters or threshold of your "Tweets" alert today, it is possible that those changes were lost. I  truly apologize for the inconvenience. Please revisit your settings if you happened to change them today.
• We have de-activated a small handful of alerts because we were unable to fully recover the settings. We will notify you individually if you were affected so that you can verify your settings and re-activate your alert.

Once again, I truly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. This is the first time we've experienced a major issue like this in the one year tweetymail has been around. It absolutely stinks. And I will do my best to make sure it won't happen again.

Over the past year, tweetymail has sent and received hundreds of thousands of emails. While we've gotten more sophisticated at processing emails, we've kept the (internal) format of the emails we send the same since Day 1: HTML only, UTF-8 encoding, and not much else.

I've always wanted to rework our email format to be more complete and consistent with email messaging guidelines, but for the most part, the emails seemed to be working just fine. We tested with every every major email client we could get our hands on: GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Apple iPhone, and BlackBerry. The emails displayed correctly in all of those clients so why mess with a good thing?

Well, it turns out that some email service providers - not email clients - had a problem with our format. Even though our emails passed spam checks, certain email providers were intentionally "breaking" the message - as a security measure - to prevent the HTML from displaying correctly. After hearing about this from a handful of users yesterday, we knew the time had come to make some changes.

Last night we started sending emails using a completely new format. The appearance of these emails remains the same, but internally, the new format should fix issues with email service providers and email clients. The new emails also include basic plain text alternatives for completeness. This is in turn means that more users (hopefully all!) should be seeing the emails how they were meant to be displayed.

This is a pretty major change and we are interested in your feedback:

• Did this new format fix email display issues that you previously had?
• Did this new format introduce any new email display issues?
• Have you noticed any changes to the delivery of email from tweetymail? In other words, are emails still reaching your inbox successfully?

What a crazy week! One week ago, we launched a brand new website and announced the FULL access version of tweetymail. And then... TechCrunch wrote about us. I am extremely excited about all of our new users and look forward to receiving some really valuable feedback. I think we've reached that point where we need a better way to communicate with you. My personal Twitter account just won't cut it anymore.

We will use this blog to announce new features, talk about changes to the service, clarify usage questions, and provide generally useful information to tweetymail users. I strongly encourage you to subscribe. I promise to keep it short and simple. We are also in the process of setting up a dedicated support forum to handle questions and issues - it should be ready very soon.

We are continuing to send out more free invites to preview the FULL access version of tweetymail. If you haven't already, sign in to your tweetymail account and use the button towards the bottom to request an invite. We are also working on a number of feature enhancements that we will tell you about over the next several weeks.

Thanks and stay tuned for more!

P.S We are using posterous for this blog and it seems really cool. After all, dead simple email services need to stick together ;-)