Hosted Email Feature Sunset


This article applies to:

As of November 10, 2020 the Hosted Email feature will no longer be available in Keap and Infusionsoft applications. 


What is it?

The Hosted Email Service stores a copy of emails sent by our customers, to their contacts, that can be viewed online for up to 90 days post-send. Emails received by contacts have (usually at the top) a link to this web hosted content that reads ‘View on web’ or ‘Having trouble viewing this email, click here to open in a web browser’ etc. If the recipient of the email could not read the content via their email client then this is effectively a back up to ensure the recipient can view the email content. Keap hosted this content for 90 days after which a ‘Page not found’ error is displayed when the link is clicked. 



Why did we remove it?

This feature was important when HTML emails could not be displayed correctly in older email clients. Today SmartPhones and modern email clients can display HTML emails so this is no longer a needed feature in 2020. This was turned off for the new email builder in June 2019 and there have been no requests to date for this feature. This feature is only included by default in emails sent from the Legacy Email builder. It is also an option under merge fields in the new email builder as the HostedEmail.link merge field. In analyzing the data for all email containing this link, usage for this feature shows less than 0.01% recipients have clicked this link (this will include security systems at email providers that click links to determine validity).


What effect will this have for me?

Due to the very low usage of this feature there should be no adverse impact to users. Any emails sent 90 days prior to the sunset date will still resolve the hosted link when clicked.  Some email sending latency was detected by the utilization of this service so the removal of this service will improve performance of large batches of emails. Any existing Broadcast Templates or Campaign Templates that utilize the HostedEmail.Link merge field will have an empty string returned. It is recommended to review templates and remove this merge field.

Some customers have this link set up in the Branding Center for 1 to 1 emails from the Contact Record. This verbiage and link can be deleted from the template and saved. Regardless, it will be stripped out when the email is sent.

There are also some customers that have used the link to include on web sites for email content to be doubled as newsletters. We do not recommend this as the link expires 90 days after the email was sent. Other customers have clicked the link to access the underlying HTML code to copy and paste to their own hosted site. Again, this is out of scope for the functionality.

However, a workaround to this is:
1. Preview the broadcast
2: Right click to Inspect the code.
3. Click the ‘Elements’ tab in the Inspector
4. Search for ‘desktopPreview’ and find the iframe id=“desktopPreview” 
5. Click the HTML child section and copy
6. Go to an HTML viewer such as https://codebeautify.org/htmlviewer/#
7. Paste in your HTML and click run
8. The HTML should render - copy and paste to your site.