The Relenta blog

It’s been about 24 hours since I signed up with Relenta and I am already hooked/addicted.  You’ve given me a single place to be home for my nine different email addresses/project aliases.  I no longer have to ask myself, “now, which computer was I on when I sent that document to Client X?”  In fact, at this exact moment, 10,038 old emails have been POP3′d into my account and now stand neatly organized in Relenta’s archives… and I daresay that I could find any one of those emails almost instantly because they are connected to my contacts in a way that makes sense.   All I can say is where the heck have you been all my life?  I’m in love.

Joy Duling, Managing Director, A 25 Hour Day, LLC www.a25hourday.com

Thank you Joy We love you back!

Egyptian sage Ptahhotep wrote in 2400 BC:

One that reckons accounts all day passes not a happy moment. One that gladdens his heart all day provides not for his house. The bowman hits the mark, as the steersman reaches land, by diversity of aim. He that obeys his heart shall command.

A more modern version is “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” But what if work is play? If you are like most of our customers, you know little distinction between the two. And so it is that you’re looking forward to getting some work done in the next couple of weeks. Because you won’t take a break, we’ll give you one: between now and January 3, 2010 you can sign up for the whole year of Relenta service for only $100 (per user):

http://www.relenta.com/allplay.html

May your holidays and year 2010 be productive, happy and full of joy. Obey your heart!

Relenta is featured today in the CRM Buyer article CRM for the Small Biz: Turning Agony Into Ecstasy by Maria Verlengia.

Choosing the right CRM solution for a small business greatly increases the chances of a successful implementation. Simple CRM systems work best for small businesses.

Amen!

This ReadWriteWeb post by our user Bernard Lunn may well be called The Hustler Manifesto. You definitely should read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts that are music to our ears:

So, email is the drill. It is the basic component. Don’t even think about working without it. You can use email to close a deal and to get a phone and/or face-to-face meeting. … My personal CRM system of choice is Relenta, precisely because it is so email-centric.

CRM and LinkedIn are about hustle. Twitter is about flow.

I avoid using Twitter DM. Twitter is great for flow, but lousy for hustle. Twitter DM only adds to messaging fragmentation and has been polluted by spam. For now, @bernardlunn mode is useful, but methinks spammers will ruin that soon, too. But the basic Twitter service is perfect. I follow until I decide to unfollow. No one can spam that.

<…>

The integration we need is not another Twitter client for people who live in the Twitter flow. It is integration of this flow with the traditional hustle tools of email and CRM.

Specifically, I want to see in my CRM system the Twitter flow of my contact, what they are writing about and who they are communicating with. If they have DM’ed me, I want to see that in my CRM.

Thanks, Bernard! Your wish is our command. The Relenta-Twitter integration is already under construction.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records let you specify which servers are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain (i.e. using you@your-domain.com“From” address).

If you’re using Relenta mail.relenta.net SMTP server to send email from your Relenta account, we strongly encourage you to publish SPF records for your domain. This way your recipient’s servers or ISP will be able to check your SPF record to make sure you’ve authorized Relenta servers to send email on your behalf.

To set your domain’s SPF record, you must have access to your domain’s DNS settings (usually via your web-hosting control panel). On your DNS resource, publish the following text record:

v=spf1 include:spf.relenta.com ~all

That’s it!

Got a WordPress site? Here’s a tutorial that shows how easy it is to set up Relenta with WordPress, courtesy of ever-helpful Foliovision. Thank you Alec, Peter and the gang!

It’s showtime again! Watch how Kurtis Squyres, our customer extraordinaire and founder of investment real estate firm FarBelowMarket.com uses Relenta to build a ravenous buyer list. Thanks Kurtis. You rock!

“Don’t be fooled when you look at it, it seems overly simple, but it does THE RIGHT THINGS, WHICH ARE MONEY MAKING THINGS.”

Kurtis Squyres

Sometimes we’re having trouble explaining to our users the mysterious appearance of photos in their Relenta contact database. Many thanks to our user Lee Walsh of The Full Service Loan Officer for creating this 2-minute video that shows the magic of Gravatar and its integration with Relenta. Enjoy!

Now Relenta automatically displays avatar images of your Relenta contacts who are Gravatar users.

A gravatar (globally recognized avatar) is an image that follows people on blogs and forums appearing beside their names when they comment on gravatar-enabled sites.

If you upload your own avatar image to a contact, it will override Gravatar’s.

Gravatar is the project of Automattic, the folks behind popular blog publishing software WordPress.