Kitchener Poster
Your time has come at last. Remember last November I did a post called Things Fall Apart about the way bits were dropping off B&W which I couldn’t fix, and great crowds of you came surging forward to offer to help? Yes you do. Come on, of course you do. You said. Come back here right now –
No but really, it’s not much. I promise. It’s just to do with the update, and sending it out. I still keep getting sad emails from people who really liked reading the update every week, and passed it around to other people and discussed it, and miss it terribly. Each one is like a stab from a serrated dagger. So I’m going to send it out by hand. That means I have to put it together by hand, which means a lot of extra copying and pasting, which takes up some time; and after all that, I have to send it to about a thousand addresses, about fifty at a time. That’s twenty sends. If just a few of you dear loyal fans would help with the sending, that would cut down on the extra pasting and clicking at my end, thus freeing up more time for me to write hectoring nagging screeching N&Cs. The webmaster is going to send me the list of addresses, and I hope to send the first resurrected update on Monday, so if any of you would like to volunteer (you there in the back, creeping out the door, I see you, we all see you), email me to that effect. Love and kisses.
Count me in for as many as won’t get me banned as a spammer. Will you divide the mails by the number of volunteers and then send us ready-made address files we can paste in, or however it works?
Yep – that’s my plan.
Thanks! Love and kisses.
Phew! Thought for a minute there that you were actually going to ask for money! Would love to help out B&W – count me in.
I’m in!
Sending mail to a list of people is a thoroughly-solved problem. A number of commercial and free services exist which would handle re-sending a message from you to a thousand addresses. All you’d have to do would be to provide the list of addresses (once) and then send the weekly update email to the list address, and approve it in the list’s web interface.
http://www.coollist.com/ and http://notifylist.com/ are two free services I found with a brief google search; if you’re interested, I’d be happy to do some research into what services look good.
You don’t have to do it by hand unless for some reason you want to, is what I’m saying.
Josh is right; delegating to a mailing list service is easier.
http://groups.yahoo.com/start
http://groups.google.com/groups/create?lnk=l
Count me in.
Ah – thanks very much, Josh; I didn’t know that. No, I don’t in the least want to do it by hand! That’s great, I’ll look into it. I guess the volunteers can go back to whatever they were doing.
Hm, then again, maybe not. As far as I can tell I’d have to start with a new list, and that’s no good; I want to send updates to the people who are already signed up, whose addresses I already have.
All the mailing list services I know of let you import an existing set of addresses once you’ve created the new list. Some (Yahoo, probably) may not let you do this without also sending a confirmation message to everyone in the existing list you’re importing, making sure they actually want to be subscribed.
I’ll go ahead and look at some of the options, and let you know which one looks like it’d be a good fit. Free is better than not free, I assume?
Oh yes – not free is not an option! I provide my labour for free, but I draw the line at actually spending money. (Apart from having to buy a computer last year.) Can’t do it, on account of not having it to spend.
I tried the notifylist place, but couldn’t see any way to import an existing set of addresses.
Thanks for the help!
P.S. Oh, hi, Josh, it’s you. Say hi to Cam!