Muy suspicioso?

On Saturday, January 17, 2015 at 7:10:30 AM UTC-7, wrote:
Would it not be less dramatic if the SSA merely added a check box for e-news on our member account page? Say, right under the field where our email ID is located? I also nuked the email w/o opening it.

http://www.ssa.org/GeneralNews?show=blog&id=3826

Unfortunately, that won't work, as you have to opt in with the service. Perhaps there will be a second posting for those who have not opted in, a link published in Soaring, or a request to contact the office if you wish inclusion (you can probably do that now anyway) so you'll get a second opt in request. As it's a paid member benefit, I doubt subscription links will be made available publicly.

A little prior warning would have helped of course.

Electronic newsletters are interesting critters from a webmaster or ISP perspective. Most ISP's have some kind of SPAM filtering in place which allows their users some to no control over white-listing or black-listing of e-mail senders. Some are very to overly aggressive at the server and ISP level, others, not so much. Plus ISP's may gray-list certain mail servers or IP addresses. It takes a fair amount of effort to determine the reason, clean up the problem, and request de-listing. On shared hosts this can affect several hundred domains.

Looking around, I found a survey comparing MailChimp against Constant Contact, with MailChimp apparently holding an edge among small businesses, but I see other reasons (cost) for wanting something like CC for an organization like the SSA. However, CC has some limiting issues which kind of stifle both content and creativity.

iContact reviews are pretty reasonable as is the cost for an organization like the SSA.

Self managed options included PHPList, but the user has to understand the nuances of throttling the sending queue to avoid poisoning the web host onto any number of black-lists. So if an aggressive ISP receives 50 e-mails in a short interval from the same e-mail, it might add that address to a SPAM blocker automatically. The long suffering mailman list-serv has no features to mollify this. Using subscription services gives access to some of the best features and protections for e-mail marketing. So there is enough effort involved that enterprising developers have been able to make a business case for providing quality services.

Frank Whiteley