06082005: Group mailings...:	Ron, irishUnsigned
more news... back to home page...

Can we ask that those of you who send out Group mailings (ie News and Gis etc) t please bear in mind the following. It is getting really difficult having to send the same tips, requests and advice to the same people every week, when the same people insist on sending bulk mail in such a way as it becomes more than a simple nuisance. 1. If you send a group mail with the list of email addresses in the 'To:' or 'CC:' fields these addresses can be "harvested" by online Spambots that then add the email addresses to their databases and (worse) sell them on. Therefore, sending an email with all your fans, mates and families addresses in it can mean they will ALL end up getting tons of Spam because of you. It happens regularly and many people have to change their email address regularly (and the Interent is slowing down) because of it. More to the point, it is avoidable. If you use an offline Mail client (Outlook, Eudora and so on) find the way to display the "BCC:" field. If you put all the addresses in the BCC field, then they are invisible to Spambots (BCC means "Blind" copies are sent so no-one sees anything but their OWN email address in the address bar)> If you really are too lazy to find out how to do this, bear in mind tha you will be added to our banned senders list to protect our own sanity 2. When sending out your group mailings, bear in mind that we in IrishUnsigned get literally tons of email all the time. At the moment I get about 10 emails a day to my peronal account, another 50-100 per day to the IrishUnsigned accounts. We have even more accounts for various other reasons and it all comes to about 1,000 emails a week including about 600 Spam (at addresses that are NEVER added to mailing lists by us, so are harvested as above). With that in mind, do NOT expect us to do anything other than read them (eventually). Any band that expects us to read their email, copy and paste it, and add it to our databases for display on the site is mad. Some of them are just plain lazy. If you want to add News or Gigs etc to the IU site, simply go to IrishUnsigned and do it yourself. On the main (home) page there are links for adding News items and Gigs, plus adding Artists details for new Artists being added to the site. Furthermore, when added in this way, your news or gig could easily end up on our own Group mailings which go out to over 2,000 people (without the addresses being visible to all, and therefore being harvested). I would recommend every one of you get a copy of "Group Mail Free" which will do all the dirty work for you (it's what I use). It's only restriction being that emails are sent in batches of 100, so you have to keep resending. Alternatively, buy the full version and it's not a problem. 3. Any time any of you (in bads or Industry organisations etc) want to discuss any of this, by all means call me (0879748263) and I'll talk to you. I am sure that if you want to talk about Labels and Industry structure etc, call Dave Reid (0863117800). However, do NOT do what more and more bands seem to be doing and send us SMS or Email asking Us to call YOU! That's just plain ridiculous. IrishUnsigned is a not-for-profit organisation, makes no money from anywhere, costs money to run and has no support from any funding of any kind. Do you seriously expect us to respond to your phonew calls at our exense? We are aware that you can phone straight through to someone's voicemail without their phone even ringing, but that does not make it right to do so, leaving a message for us to call YOU back. It isn't going to happen and you'll jsut become persona non grata with us. Sorry for the rant, but can you imagine how much hassle it is: getting Spam by the bucketload so you have to change your email addresses all the time, answerphone messages asking you to call some stranger for an unspecified reason, and being expected to spend the weekend copy-pasting someone else's News and Gigs into the database? More than a pain in the proverbial backside, that's for sure...

Email the author

Printer-friendly version