At 03:45 PM 2002-11-21 -0500, Beartooth wrote:
> I'm still running my little list entirely by hand, though I
>still hope to automate it one day. My practice has been to send out
>a purge notice about once a year, and replace the list with a new
>one composed of those who reply to it, saying "keep me on." That
>way anybody killfiling the list -- or worse, hitting delete on
>sight every time -- gets off by default, and I have a manual form
>of opt-in.
>
> Is that in line with what the big kids do, given my small
>scale?
I personally think that reconfirmations are a bad idea. They increase the
load on the subscribers without doing anything positive. Frankly, I do not
even like the first of the month notifications from mailman. The only
lists that should consider using those are ones that rarely get postings
and want to insure that an address is not gapped so that an inheritor gets
postings to a list they did not subscribe to, and you can simply send the
notification as a posting to the list. In that case, the right frequency is
about once a month.
> Some of the regulars have opted in half a dozen or more
>times. I can give well over 99 44/100% odds they will again. Any
>easy routine -- especially once I do automate (and, I hope, set the
>purge to run at 365-day intervals as a cron job) to spare them the
>bother?
Why do you bother in the first place? Are you using a service that charges
you by the subscriber? I am on some lists (technical) that I do not
read. I archive them on my own server, and I search the archives when I
have a question to insure that the question is not recently
asked-and-answered before asking. If they reconfirmed, I'd miss it and I'd
be off the list. This list may have different characteristics, and a
charter that requires that the people actually read the list. That is the
only justification I can see for using reconfirmations.
You should be managing dead addresses with bounces, not
reconfirmations. In fact, I consider the whole concept of reconfirmations
and even periodic separate probes like listserv does (or at least, one
listserv list that I am on does) to be essentially broken. Modern MLMs can
probe properly for bounces using tags and VERP, if you are not using a MLM
that is capable of using those techniques you should upgrade. If you are
hand managing your subscriber list, you can hand manage your bounces as
well and you can hand manage removing subscribers when the mail starts
bouncing hard.
--
If you doubt that magnet therapy works, I put to you this observation: When
refrigerators were first invented, in the 1940s, they were rather
unreliable, but then they became significantly more reliable. The basic
design of the refrigerator did not change, and we all know that quality was
important back then, so I doubt that newer refrigerators are made better.
Refrigerators have become more reliable because of the rise of the
refrigerator magnet.
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
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