[ale] mass email for school and school web site - LONG RESPONSE

[Robert Reese]

Hi Daniel,

Tuesday, June 2, 2009, 8:19:43 AM, you wrote:

> My daughter's school wants to send 700+ (up to 1000) email blasts
> to parents (school newsletter, etc.), and we may be looking at a new
> web site (and could integrate the email blasts into the web site, or
> just blast summaries and put the whole thing on the web site, e.g.).
> They've used Constant Contact, and another school uses Pommo . Any
> suggestions? I personally don't want to manage a server and would
> worry that Comcast might block it from my home, e.g. 


There are two parts to this response:

The first, right below, is my cynical and technical opinions; I'm a difficult person to please but I have my justifiable reasons, many of which are explained.

The second part is relaying my experiences in taking over a newsletter and creating a mailing list for a church with several hundred members; not unlike what you are considering.  I think you will find this particularly useful.

R~

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"There's a reason for standards..."

I personally block / blacklist anything coming from Constant Contact and the other blasting services; none of them use (or enforce) the output of plain-text only email parts.  The messages are typically blank when not viewed in HTML, which I *refuse* to do for safety and security reasons mostly.  That, and marketers think that email is a legitimate way to advertise.

In 15 years, I have seen exactly TWO useful HTML messages, and one of them still could have been just as clear in plain-text: in one, a gentleman for whom my wife works asked her to change a 'highlighted' phrase to another phrase in a grant she was reviewing.  The other useful HTML email was several years ago and displayed tabular data. Two useful examples out of hundreds of thousands of emails.  What's the chance that any of the school's email will make the grade for HTML usefulness?

Additionally, don't forget about CAN-SPAM which really does require a plain-text portion unless you set up the system to handle responded requests for opting out via replies.  One of the issues with HTML-only bulk emails is they violate CAN-SPAM by not making the opt-out mechanism available to non-HTML users.

I'd recommend, at the very least, the school _ensure_ there is a plain-text foundation of the body before adding HTML.  (In fact, I recommend plain-text only; there's rarely ever any usefulness in HTML!)  That way, regardless of the device used by the parents and/or students, the email will be viewable.  It will also make it less likely to be marked as spam AND help ensure CAN-SPAM compliancy.

one more benefit of plain-text only: Size matters.  Plain-text emails  use factors of size LESS bandwidth, since each message won't be the equivalent of sending an Encyclopedia Brittanica just because Jenny's mom thought a few gratuitous graphics made the email look prettier and John's dad wanted to play with fonts and its varied attributes.  You've seen them: HTML message - 157K, plain-text version - 1.3K.  Plus, with HTML you risk, and can bet that, a good number of people will not be able to see it and many more won't see it correctly rendered.


As for the system to send these out, I'd contact Comcast and set up a school website with Comcast's business department (if the school is on Comcast).  Alternately, if you and the school decide to allow you to do it either at home or administer from home, also contact the Comcast business department and set up a business account.  That way Comcast's spam cops are aware of the inevitable complaints along with any triggers on their end BEFORE they happen.  They can be ready with a sytem of handling the complaints and a policy and procedure to deal with them and with you.  I see no reason why Comcast wouldn't be able to accommodate you since the volume really isn't that high.  That would essentially leave the other vital statistic:  FREQUENCY. It counts, too: too high and you'll get complaints and a lot of unsubscribe requests.  Too low, and people forget you aren't spammers and, without thinking, will mark your email as spam or your domain as a spammer.

Note: using a web hosting company is likely to not be a pleasant experience unless you get into the higher-end hosting.  The likelihood of ending up on a blackhole list increases.  These inexpensive shared hosting companies frequently end up there.

BTW, do I really need to say that each message needs to be individually addressed rather than BCC'd, or worse, in the TO or CC field?  I didn't think I needed to go there.  Besides, customized emails are read more than generic ones.  The only thing I hate worse than HTML, attachments, or even spam, is multiple email addresses exposed in the headers, including mine.



Lastly, and perhaps one of the most important things, NO ATTACHMENTS!  Especially MS Office or EXE files, and certainly never anything over 100Kb.  Send links to files instead.  Email was not, is not, and never will be designed to be a file transfer system.  That's why FTP exists, literally.  People have had very, very, very bad days as a result of sending massive, proprietary, un-zipped, unsolicited attachments to me.  And those that send MS Office attachments receive an education (and of those, they who don't listen get a special kind of Hell response the next go-round.)

Sending attachments not only waste your bandwidth and time, they are a waste of the recipient's bandwidth, time, inbox space, harddrive space and time (I said it twice because they have to waste time waiting for it to download and more time to delete it).  If the school is honest with itself, it will realize that only a small percentage of recipients will to open it and far fewer will actually want it.

Bandwidth Wasting Example: If you send a 1MB file to 1000 people, that is a Gigabyte of bandwidth being taken.  Let's say that 75 people actually wanted it.  The wasted internet bandwidth, including the sending mail server's, is 925MB.  How many plain-text messages could be sent in a Gigabyte of bandwidth?  How many plain-text messages can be stored in a mail client which has a fatal capacity of 2GB/4GB?  And how much time is wasted downloading and dealing with it?

With attachments, you risk pushing the recipients email box toward, or even exceeding, the quota/capacity.  How many important emails can be bounced?  How many mailing lists will accidentally be made to drop the recipient from its mailing list?  To this day I know of 10MB max quota for mail boxes being used in business.  And that is the ISP's cap, not the company's.

Links provide a much faster distribution of the email, a much greater likelihood of receipt, a lower likelihood of rejection, a lower likelihood of being banned or unsubscribed, a lower chance of incurring the wrath of the host/ISP/blackhole operators, and much lower bandwidth requirements, including essentially *UNLIMITED* attachment size and quantity!  Furthermore, the recipients can choose to download the file(s) at their leisure should they in fact actually choose to accept it or them. Plus, you'll get an idea of how many people are interested in the file(s) to start.  A benefit that is frequently overlooked is that you can quickly and easily create useful archives with practically no additional effort other than a few scripts and a couple of cron jobs.



OTOH, I don't use my browser as an email client, just as I don't use my email client as a browser.  I *hate* senders trying to force a web page on me in the guise of a message.  I also dislike it when all I get is "to see this message properly, click here" (and the invariably missing link).  Before round-filing the message, I tell them "If you're gonna send me a message, send me a message; don't redirect me to a website!  Oh, and by the way, you're link is MISSING anyway!"  Jeesh..

In a nutshell, a plain-text message BEFORE inserting any gratuitous HTML, make sure RAW links exist, no attachments, no links to proprietary documents, no more than one email address exposed to anyone else, and have a backup plan should your ISP or hosting company suddenly make you dark.  Oh, and *please* make the Reply address valid.
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Experience
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What I learned when my wife and I did something similar several years ago:

We took over the monthly newsletter for our church.  At the time it was a 100% print, stuff, and mail operation for hundreds of members.  We quickly introduced an electronic version and then quickly created a website and email aliases.  After the initial confusion of how the newsletter distribution was changed, we had roughly 10% that still wanted the paper mailed copy, and about 70% of the remaining were happy with the plain-text version.  The remaining folks downloaded the full-color 11" x 17" PDF version.  Note that there were TWO versions: a members-only version with a password and a public version with certain information, photos, and such removed.  It took less than 30 minutes to create the second version and upload it.

Additionally, we had a weekly short plain-text-only email of mini announcements, events, reminders, and such that went out.  Interestingly, the couple of months during summer that we skipped the monthly newsletter lead to far fewer vociferous complaints than when  I accidentally or through no control of my own failed to issue the weekly email.  I was virtually lynched the couple of times the weekly failed to get out!

After the first year, many simply didn't need or want the monthly email full version.  At that point I stopped issuing a monthly full version  email and simply inserted a link to the PDF in the weekly email.  A handful of people were unhappy and switched back to the paper version.  Maybe a half dozen folks?  This saved several hours from many people's month and got information out much more quickly and efficiently.

We further migrated away from the monthly newsletter by making a separate full-color PDF calendar download.  The calendar eventually had a little more than 70% download rate on average. (We also had a digital online calendar, too, which at the time was rarely used - this was before Google Calendar was available.) I'd say 80% of the non-mail recipients wanted only the weekly email plus the new alternate stand-alone full-color monthly calendar.  The online full monthly PDF download dropped to around 30%, depending on what was going on.  It turned out that the discrepancy was due to people downloading it more than once, or more than one member of the family downloading it, etc.

Interestingly, it helped that the weekly stuff was also going into the monthly stuff.  That made the monthly newsletter far easier to manage.  By the way, no one EVER listened to us about the monthly deadline.  We made more than one member quite pissed; one even wanted us to throw away more than $100 worth of printed newsletters (that were already nearly a week late) so we could insert the member's stuff.  We were dumbstruck by that.  On the opposite side, the weekly email went out on a tight schedule that was pretty much iron-clad.  A few times I had to send out an addendum or "emergency" email, but people quickly accepted and followed a deadline for it.  And if they missed the deadline, they were early for the next one.  Yes, plenty were unhappy but few were furious AND everyone knew they were responsible for not getting it to me in time.


It helped, too, that the weekly email was less formal and made it feel more familiar and friendly since this lead to something curious.  Remember that I had said we had started from the very beginning by creating an alias list for our members?  I also created a special mail list address and mail list, similar to this ALE list.  What was curious is that the weekly email prompted others to use the mail list  with growing frequency.  It took about 18 months, but the list finally just literally took off on its own.  Yes, there were plenty of viruses/worms, particularly on that mail list, but the church decided quickly to approve adding anti-virus scanning to the the email list.  This further reduced the amount of information getting into the monthly newsletters and frequently avoided the necessity of using the weekly notification email.

But the aliases created an even more remarkable set of benefits as you are about to see. The first one is that it meant we almost completely  bypassed and avoided any kind of spam trigger or complaint because this meant that the email blast went ONLY to our own domain email addresses!!  From there, the forwarding rules sent the email to its proper destination and thus we, for the most part, avoided the spam issues.  (We found, as we went along, that certain mail systems did not permit forwarded email.  For those individuals, numbering between 3 and 6, we sent them their own email individually; a check-box on my email client did that for me automatically.)


The alias made life much easier for members, too.  For a change of email address, the only thing the member needed to do was to update us with his or her new email address.  No longer did members need to keep up with email addresses or endure making those dreaded, oh-so-hated-and-burdensome email address change announcements which take months or years to get around to everyone.  Nope, all they had to do was simply tell exactly one person: me.

Furthermore, this resulted in increased security and privacy as the members could keep their real email addresses private if they so chose.  Plus, the could have additional protections assigned to their church email address just by requesting it.

Because of aliasing, the members-only directory needed only to have ingressing members' email addresses added and egressing members' email removed.  Since the email address was pretty brain-dead simple (first.last at chuch.org, few exceptions) people rarely bothered to look up addresses anymore unless they either did not know or remember a person's name or spelling.  This made it very easy for people to create their own email contact group, which in turn made it easy for them to email each other, ironically reducing the dependence on the mail list.



All in all, we saved the church tens of thousands of dollars, brought several "retirement-age" folks into the computer age (nearly all were grateful) and established efficient, useful, and highly relevant information streams to and from the church and its members.


How it ended:
Only the birth of our first child (our son Xen) stopped us eventually, though the week he was born I still got the weekly email out!  (guess what the leading story was...)  We soon passed the responsibility to another member volunteer appointed by the board and minister (a very nice person who owned an IT company), and who ultimately destroyed virtually everything my wife and I achieved the previous years - in under a week decimated the website I had created and broke the mail list and converted everyone over to a Word-based HTML email (I think) format.  As a humourous transpiration, he hosted the "new and improved" website internally on IIS, and within a month the email database had been compromised and pillaged, resulting in flooding all those heretofore private, spam-free church-based aliases with ungodly loads of pr0n spam.  I sent out one last 'weekly' announcement letting everyone know that I had nothing to do with the preceding events and how to contact the person responsible for these changes and issues. (remember, I still had the "real" email address list. ;c)


Hope ALL this helps, really!
Robert~