E-mail

I’m going to partake of a little nostalgia here. Stop reading if you don’t care about the early days of interactive news. …

Back in 1994, I started an e-mail discussion list called Online-News. It turned out to be the primary hangout for lots of the pioneers in the field of online news, and continued to be a thriving industry discussion venue for many years.

It was so long ago that in those days we were talking about the merits of dial-up bulletin board services; which proprietary online service (AOL, Prodigy, Delphi, Interchange, and some I’ve forgotten) news organizations should hook up with; and this fledgling thing called the World Wide Web, and whether or not we should take it seriously.

I served as list “owner” for quite a while, and when I went to work for the Poynter Institute in 2001, the lists went with me to be hosted there. I left my Poynter job in 2006, but Online-News continued on, residing on Poynter’s servers.

Alas, Online-News is no more. When Poynter Online introduced its new design in the last week, the old Online-News mailing list went away, replaced by a web discussion area: Journalism Conversations: Online & Multimedia.

I’m hoping that the new “Groups” functionality of Poynter Online will support a continuation of the great conversation that we Online-News members have had over these many years.

I am a bit worried that the rebranding and the ridding of the name Online-News will confuse people about what happened to it. So this is my attempt at leaving a record of the transition, and hoping that old Online-News members will make the transition. There’s still plenty to talk about!

Can anyone advise me on a Twitter feed challenge? See the comic avatar of me in the upper right of this blog page? There’s a talk balloon, and I’d like to get my latest post from Twitter to show inside that balloon. (That is, the balloon is updated with new text whenever I post a new tweet.)

Anyone got any suggestions for pulling that off? Thanks!!

In yesterday’s tip I talked about e-mail sub-lists as a marketing tool. Here’s another bit of e-mail advice: Personalize your e-mails to improve open rates.

It’s been demonstrated that inserting personalization variables into outgoing e-mails’ subject lines significantly increases the number of people who open an e-mail. We all get so many messages — many of them spam that slip through our spam filters — so it’s important to have strong and relevant subject lines that entice recipients to open your messages. You may have a brilliantly thought-out e-mail communications program for your audience or member base, but if they don’t open your messages, that’s a lot of wasted effort. Continued

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some domains sitting around gathering dust (and costing annual renewal fees). In my case, projects that didn’t work out, or projects that were envisioned but never got off the ground, are the reason.

I’ve got a couple domains that I think are pretty good names:

• Clearmail.com
• AthleteMoms.com

Clearmail.com is from a long time ago, when spam wasn’t yet a huge problem and there weren’t many solutions to it available yet. I hooked up with a couple other folks, including a software developer who had a good idea (we thought at the time). It didn’t get off the ground. And I also wonder why I got involved, since it was a bit outside my expertise and interests.

There aren’t many domains left with “mail” in the name. Could anyone use this one? Make an offer (please!).

AthleteMoms.com I think is a great domain for someone wanting to target that demographic niche. Any takers?

On a small e-mail discussion list that I’m on, one of the participants inadvertently sent everyone a PDF of a couple prescriptions for a family member. Obviously, her e-mail was intended to go elsewhere — probably her pharmacist. It was one of those “oh, s***!” mistakes that the speed of digital communications makes too easy.

Who among us hasn’t done something like this? If you can say that you’ve never sent an e-mail or instant message to the wrong person and it ended up being embarrassing, then you must be an abnormally careful person.

This incident reminded me of my worst instance of this kind of boo-boo. It was an instant-message exchange, using a corporate system (since this was well before IM entered the world), between me and a co-worker at a newspaper. I was working as a copy editor, and I was exchanging messages with a reporter, who was in another room not 50 feet from me. We were discussing the section editor, who was in his office nearby.

In addition to messaging the reporter, I was also messaging the editor; two instant online conversations were going on simultaneously. You can guess what happened. … The one message I sent to the reporter that was disparaging of the editor, well, that was the one I accidentally sent to the editor. Oh, s***!

What’s your most embarrassing digital working-too-fast moment?

So, spam now accounts for 90-95% of all e-mail. That’s up from 5% in 2001, and 70% in 2004 when the federal CAN-SPAM Act went into effect. That’s depressing.

Personally, I’m not bothered too much by receiving spam, since Gmail does a pretty good job filtering it. But where it has an impact is that I’m pretty certain that the occasional “false-positive” — an e-mail meant for me that’s not spam but is caught by the filter — is going into my spam folder.

I used to check the spam folder periodically, scanning through looking for personal mail put there by mistake. But that’s untenable these days with the volume of spam that Gmail catches on my behalf. I don’t even bother looking there any more.

But I often wonder what I’ve missed.

I thought I’d confirmed my subscription to MSNBC.com’s e-mail news alerts using its antiquated e-mail list system. I had to jump through a bunch of absurd hoops (including starting a new subscription after renewing the old one didn’t work), and the latest — after I thought it was completed — is this e-mail I just received:

Your command:

SUBSCRIBE BREAKINGNEWS Steve Outing

has remained unconfirmed for more than 48h and is being cancelled. If you did want it executed but were unable to send the confirmation in time, just re-issue the command to get a new confirmation code. The one you were sent before can no longer be used.

I’m guessing that the confirmation e-mail (I thought I’d already dealt with that) they sent me went into my spam filter. And now I have to repeat the process, but the instructions above are obtuse.

What’s the deal, MSNBC.com? Why are you still using an antiquated and apparently buggy e-mail list system? The one you’re using is stuck in 1995!

I got the e-mail below this morning, apparently from MSNBC.com, asking me to renew the e-mail breaking news alerts I receive from them. Is this for real? I checked the header, thinking maybe it was a crude spammer’s attempt to harvest e-mail addresses, but it sure looks like it is from MSNBC.com. Here’s the text of the e-mail:

Your subscription to the BREAKINGNEWS list is due for renewal. If you wish to remain subscribed to BREAKINGNEWS, please issue the following command to LISTSERV@LISTS.MSNBC.COM at your earliest convenience:

CONFIRM BREAKINGNEWS

You will be automatically removed from the list if you do not send a CONFIRM command within the next 14 days.

PS: In order to facilitate the task, this message has been specially formatted so that you only need to forward it back to
LISTSERV@LISTS.MSNBC.COM to have the command executed. Note that while the formats produced by the forwarding function of most mail packages are supported, replying will seldom work, so make sure to forward and not reply.

If this is for real, I’m shocked that in 2007 a major news organization is using e-mail publishing techniques that hark back to the mid 1990s. I used to run e-mail lists and fondly recall this sort of clunky e-mail admin interface. But it’s antiquated now, replaced by better systems where the user only has to click a customized URL to confirm a subscription like this.

The part about having to forward the message because reply probably won’t work is crazy! … Unless you’re still living in 1995.

At one point in time I used to check my spam folder in Gmail to make sure nothing important slipped in there by accident. I’d regularly find a personal message or two. But now, the amount of stuff going into the spam bucket is so huge that I don’t have time to look for good messages that may have slipped through. I can only hope that Gmail is doing a good job.

Have you e-mailed me and haven’t gotten a responses? While it could be that I’m overwhelmed with non-spam e-mail and haven’t had time to respond, the other possibility is that you were tagged by Gmail as spam — and I’ll never know.

Perhaps the young generation has it right. Many of them consider e-mail their parents’ generation online tool and communicate via instant messaging, SMS phone messages, Facebook and MySpace. Spam is a bit less of a problem since those direct-communication channels are open primarily to friends — not any anonymous spammer who wants to come calling.

Increasingly, I’m getting messages from people via Facebook. That is, folks who are in my friends list on FB (around 200 now) go to my profile page and then use FB to send a message. I am alerted to the message with an e-mail, of course, but that just provides a link to the message on FB. I respond within FB.

Problem: I use my e-mail archive constantly, using Gmail’s incredible and fast search functionality to find stuff. But when there’s a thread stored on Facebook — when I’ve had a conversation with someone on FB — I can’t easily search for that. My communication archive is getting scattered.

I assume someone will soon come up with a solution. (Google? Most likely; I hear they’re working on it.) I want to be able to search across all the online discussions I’ve had in the past, on multiple platforms. That’s necessary, since an increasing number of folks now communicate outside of e-mail, especially younger people.