Thanks for the further explanation (and the link to the status descriptions--I had not seen that post). Since it seems that further commenting on an idea not yet planned may help move it forward, here are some further thoughts on the idea of moving the test notification to the top of the email. First off, I want to say that I really appreciate the efforts by Constant Contact to report more clearly on the status of ideas. And I feel that a further note such as the one you have here, explaining what the thinking is on why things are not moving forward at a particular point in time really helps us know what is going on, and I bet it will help you too, since we can respond to your assessment in real time, so to speak. With regard to the particular points you make here, I do appreciate the thinking that it's important to see the test campaign as it will be seen by the subscribers, and that the notification at the top could disrupt that. It seems to me, however, that that is not much of a concern--it's easy enough to imagine what it would look like without that sentence in red at the top. The point about how the preheader shows up is a concern, to some degree. However, it doesn't seem that significant since the test message includes any message that's in the test comment (for instance we put a version number in ours) as the beginning of the preheader, even when we specify a preheader in the field designated for that. Couldn't your coding give priority to the designated preheader? Otherwise it is very hard to check the preheader in a test. For similar reasons, I agree that having "TEST" in the subject line somewhat disrupts the ability to assess how much of the subject line will be viewed in the inbox, but you can make a guess. Especially if all that is added is like 6 characters: *TEST*! Also, since there are so many variations on how much of the subject line is displayed, including email provider, browser vs email client, the individual subscribers settings, you can't really make that much of a judgment of what a subject line is going to look like anyway. I get the first point about why it was originally there at the bottom with regard to the footer, but I sincerely doubt that very many people reviewing test emails concern themselves with that--at least in my experience they mainly pay attention to the body of the email. Many don't even "notice" the subject line! But for me and most of the people who've been making the case for moving the message up to the top, the overriding factor is that too often the tests are overlooked/not responded to because they are assumed by the recipient to be the final send. Something is needed at the top to clue them in--otherwise testing is not very effective.
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