"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)
A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
considering becoming one.
_____________________________________________________
October 16, 1998
In this issue:
"You've got your business on line. You know you need a
newsletter; you've got some great ideas for the first
issue, but are you ready to manage your list server?"
_____________________________________________________
"The Desktop Global Marketer" is free, and may be
re-published freely with permission. We encourage
you to give it to your friends.
For subscription (or un-subscription) details,
and other information, please see the end of the
newsletter.
For any other purpose, please write to:
jamie(at)siderealdesigns.com
Or visit us at:
http://siderealdesigns.com
_____________________________________________________
You've got your business on line. You know you need a
newsletter; you've got some great ideas for the first issue,
but are you ready to manage your list server?
An email newsletter is a tremendously powerful tool for a
virtual enterprise. Properly used it enables you to reach
new clients and maintain ties with old ones. However, all
things come with a price; running a newsletter is work and
can be a source of technical frustration and anxiety if
computers aren't your area of expertise.
We've examined the reasons why you should have a newsletter
in previous issues. In this issue, for those of you who have
or are considering having an email newsletter, we'll look at
some of the practical problems confronting the proud owner
of a new newsletter and some ways to ease the pain.
Let's first quickly review what the pieces of the puzzle
are:
The heart of your newsletter is a piece of software called a
"mailing list server," or often just "list server." It is
not an essential part of a web site, but most web sites come
with access to one already installed on your host
machine. Then it's just a matter of your webmaster
configuring it for your particular application.
This piece of software performs many functions. One of them
is to manage a list of addresses. This is called the
"distribution list" and is where all of your subscriber's
addresses go. When the list server's boss (you) emails it
something, it will turn around and forward a copy of it to
everyone on that list. That's how your newsletter gets sent
out. Your mailing list may grow quite large quite
rapidly. If you make an announcement to the List of Lists,
you might get a thousand subscriptions in a day or two. You
don't want to have to manage this by hand and your list
server will try to do the job for you. Most of the time it
succeeds.
As part of managing the list of addresses, it will accept
mail from people who are asking to be subscribed or
unsubscribed, and do the appropriate thing to your
distribution list. It will also send them a letter of
confirmation. Your webmaster may put up a subscription page
on your web site which allows people to fill out a form to
subscribe or unsubscribe as well. If so, she will have added
code to make the form-handler of the web page communicate
with the list server about it so the list server knows to
adjust the list and send the letters.
In practice there are quite a few more functions involved,
and many choices of how they operate in detail, but those
are the essentials. Also there are many brands of list
server, and while each of them does the same basic jobs,
each has its own idiosyncracies. (The three most common are
ListServ, Procmail, and Majordomo.) You should take the time
to become familiar with the commands and requirements of the
one you have.
Now assuming all of this has been set up and tested, you are
ready to begin luring subscribers and sending out
newsletters. However, there are complications - people often
misunderstand or ignore directions, or make typos, or become
confused. A good list server can deal with quite a bit of
this, but frequently it will have to call on the List
Administrator for guidance, and you are about to be
introduced to the burdens you have assumed by donning the
mantle of List Administrator. Managing your mailing list is
a chore you must perform on a more or less regular basis,
or, if it gets too onerous (the price of wild success!) you
can hire an assistant to do it.
One kind of problem you may be called on to deal with is a
letter from your list server informing you of some event it
can't handle. Usually the solution is very simple, but if
you haven't learned how to interpret and understand the
messages from the list server it can be quite confusing.
Often the list server will forward to you the mail it can't
figure out and put its own comments to you in special places
in the letter's header called "X-headers." These might be
comments like "Subscription request for address already
subscribed" or "unsubscribe request for address not in list"
or similar things. What you need to be aware of is that most
mail-reading programs wont show you the X-headers unless you
explicitly turn them on. Usually there will be an option
called "Show extended headers" or something similar. If
you're not aware of this the mail from your list server may
seem completely cryptic.
The problems you will need to deal with may be of many
kinds, but a few common ones account for almost all of what
you'll deal with. The first kind is undeliverable
addresses. These MAY be due to someone having entered their
own email address incorrectly. However, the undeliverable
address MAY also be due to the recipient machine being
temporarily down and/or some intermediate gateway on the
path to them being temporarily down at the time of the
mailing. The only way to distinguish between these - which
is not foolproof - is to wait 24 hours and send out a
'probe' email message to the offending address and see if it
still bounces. Once you're convinced it's more than
temporarily faulty, unsubscribe them.
If you think you see what the reason for the bad address is,
e.g., '.cmo' instead of '.com', first unsubscribe the bad
address and then subscribe the (hypothetically) correct
version. It would be wise to first send test email to the
hypothetically-correct address (it might ask them if they
are the party who intended to subscribe) and see if it
bounces.
The other common problem which will cause the list server to
seek your help is a person who does not follow
directions. Instead of putting the required information into
the body of a subscription letter in the required format
they will send something like, "Please subscribe me to your
very interesting newsletter. Thank you." To your list server
this might as well be Martian and it will give you a comment
like "unrecognized command." Fortunately the problem will be
immediately appearant to you and you can just subscribe them
yourself.
A different category of letter is the one coming from a
human having a problem with your list. These are almost
invariably problems with unsubscribing. (Not infrequently
they are abusive; people find this frustrating - it has been
truly said that a major feature of the Internet is that it
allows you to be insulted by people you've never met.)
The person will tell you that he has tried several times to
unsubscribe, each time carefully entering his exact email
address on the unsubscribe form or in the unsubscription
request email. The list server keeps telling him it has no
such address on its list, but he keeps getting your
newsletter. There is a very simple explanation. He thinks
his email address is "joe(at)foobar.com", but actually there
are several machines handling mail at the Foobar Corporation
and they have names like "mail2.foobar.com." These machines
all "alias" such mail to Joe, so mail sent to joe(at)foobar.com
will be forwarded invisibly to Joe once it gets to the
foobar domain, and he thinks that's actually his exact email
address. If you mail through a big ISP such as Erols or AOL,
you probably have the same thing.
Unfortunately, Joe subscribed to your list by putting the
word "subscribe" in the body of an email and your list
server obligingly took his address off the received-from
address line of his email header, where it found
joe(at)mail2.foobar.com and that's how it entered his
subscription. When he tries to unsubscribe with the simpler
form of the address, it doesn't match.
To fix this you need to know how to get a hold of your
subscriber list and search it for "joe" or "foobar" and find
the offending address and unsubscribe it for him. How you
get a hold of this list will differ with each installation -
ask your webmaster. If you have more than a few dozen
subscribers you'll want to do the search using the "find"
function of your editor. This is fine because the
distribution list is just a text file. Some list servers are
able to perform such searches for you, and some can be set
to suggest the best matches directly to the person who is
attempting to unsubscribe.
There are other problems about which you'll be getting
email, either from your list server or from your
subscribers, but the ones I've mentioned will account for
95% of what you need to deal with. If you're prepared and
know how to recognize them and understand the problem and
fix it, actually doing so is fairly painless. Preparing for
this before you send out your first newsletter will save you
a lot of anxiety when seemingly-cryptic problem reports
start showing up in your inbox.
The final, and hardest, problem is this: You have to
actually write a newsletter on some regular schedule. People
expect you to show up regularly with something to say but
you're terribly busy, and after all it wont really hurt if
you do it tomorrow. This one is your problem; I'll stick to
helping you with the more technical issues. (You'll notice
this edition is about two weeks late :)
_____________________________________________________
To subscribe, send email to:
newsletter-request(at)siderealdesigns.com
and include the word subscribe as the only item in
the body of the letter.
To unsubscribe, send email to:
newsletter-request(at)siderealdesigns.com
and include the word unsubscribe as the only item in
the body of the letter.
If you have problems with either of these, write directly
to jamie(at)siderealdesigns.com for prompt attention from
a human.
If you would like to re-publish any of our newsletters,
at no cost, please contact jamie(at)siderealdesigns.com.
"Sidereal" is pronounced sy-DEER-ee-all, and means "of
or pertaining to the stars, the heavens, etc."
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