About a week ago Darren Rowse from Problogger.net wrote a public letter to Feedburner where he asked them to step it up a notch. In that letter he asked them to allow us more customization options for our emails that get sent out through their service. His number one complaint was that the subject line of every single email that is sent to our subscribers is always the name of your site…nothing more and nothing less.

There was no way of creating custom subject lines for each new blog post. One commenter on his article mentioned that she would login to Feedburner before posting every article and change the name of the feed so that it would always reflect the most recent article. That process would get old very quick.

Apparently Feedburner heard the voice of the Darren Rowse because they have just implemented this very thing in their services. We now have the option to brand our emails with a subject that reflects the title of the post that is being mailed out!

In order to use this new feature simply follow these easy steps.

1. Login to Feedburner and navigate to the ‘Email Branding’ tab.

2. Locate the field titled ‘Email Subject/Title’ Include ${latestItemTitle} in order to reflect the name of your latest post. As you can see in my example, I have it set to reflect both the name of the post and the name of the site seperated by a hyphen.

Great work, Feedburner!