Would this work?

MSE_Martin

Hi techie folks, hoping for some feedback.

Unfortunately the content of the weekly tip is very similar to that of much spam (except its not unsolicited and is proper unbiased info obviously) ie it mentioned mortgages, freebies, etc all the time.

I'm considering sending a plaint text email saying something like

"Hi. Many people have reported they don't get the Money Tips. This is because it sometimes gets blocked by spam filters as its a mass mailing. This has been sent in plain text to help get through that problem.

Please add martin@moneysavingexpert.com to your buddy/contact list - which should mean you get the tip"

1. Do you think this would help
2. Do you have anything else we could do (we already check the tip content with spam assassain and have the server whitelisted where possible)
3. How would you feel if you got this email - would it make you unsubscribe?

any thoughts gratefully appreciated

martin

mike_paterson

I am sure that it would help those that have the problem (not me fortunately).
Maybe you could also have a pop-up (or similar) when new people subscrive to the newsletter to let them know of the problem, and to add you to their contact list ?

Cheers
Mike

mynamesnotdave

Text only email would definately help, I find most people prefer it too, especially as quite a few webmail clients make a hash of displaying html mail correctly.

Adding to the buddy list is a good tip, but thats only available on some email clients (hotmail, yahoo etc) so you may want to point that out.

In this age of spam, I'm not sure how much more you can do, other than just sending out a page link in your email and making sure none of your servers are blacklisted that would actually help you that much.

payless

Not sure if this would put too much strain on servers, could it be loaded on to the site ( or a special third party site ) and then just email a link to everyone ?

gizmoleeds

The problem is that many spamfilers operatred by the email providers will remove messages they think are mass mailings on the basis that they recognise they get a lot of them, so this plain text message could get blocked too.

I turned on my BT spamfilter once to try it, but just set it to 'mark' so-called spam (it would add the word [BULK] to the beginning of the subject). It missed a lot of real spam, but marked as [BULK] messages from my mum along the lines of "What do you want for tea?".

It is worth a try though, as I don't think anyone would unsubscribe as a result of this message, and hopefully a plain-text message would get through more spamfilters.

wolfman

Yeah like mentioned above you could adopt something similar to what silicon.com use. It's basically an html newsletter with a very brief title and summary for each article and a hyperlink to the relevant webpage. Basically strip out a lot of what's in the email and try and get it put into web content and hyperlinked.

By doing this not only would you be able to cut down on spam keywords in the email, but you'd also take a load off the email server, and keep people's inboxes a little emptier.

The key though, is for people to allow the email through their spam filters, so an email asking people to do so maybe be worth while. It's very difficult to write a newsletter (especially of this nature) and not get problems with it.

sra

I'd like to see a letter that just links to the email on the site rather than emailing me the whole thing

I realize having a large email mailing list gives Martin and the site great credibility - so having the email at a static address like moneysavingexpert.com/letter might be bad because people would unsubscribe and just bookmark that page instead.

But you could give the email a differnt random address each week like
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1060562796,155,
and only people who are subscribed would get the link to the tip.


A big advantage would be that you could embed a player to play the mutterings instead of the pain I have of trying to download it!

alison74

3. How would you feel if you got this email - would it make you unsubscribe?


It wouldnt make me unsubscribe, just probably help to make sure I got it.

Mr_Skint_2

Cant you type out a letter and send that?

NellyLock

Mr_Skint wrote:

Cant you type out a letter and send that?

im sure he might think about this...if your willing to lick a few thousand stamps

Mr_Skint_2

NellyLock wrote:

im sure he might think about this...if your willing to lick a few thousand stamps

I have a big sponge.............