I recently wrote about the new layout of our newsletter, and why that happened. Well, one other thing we did this month was change the software that we use to send out our newsletter. The old software was really primitive. The only thing it did was send e-mails. Now, you might think that is all you would need your newsletter-sending software to do, but there are a lot of other things it should do that are not only a good idea, they are practically a necessity.
For example: I’m sure some of you have “retired” an e-mail address. That is, you’ve changed your e-mail address and stopped using your old one. After a few years of being idle, your e-mail address may go back up for grabs. That is, it gets removed until someone else claims it. Another thing that could happen is an internet service provide could use your retired e-mail address as a “spam trap”. They use it to try to see who is sending spam, and then add those spammers to a blacklist. A blacklist is just a shared listing on the internet of known spammers. These blacklists dramatically reduce the amount of spam that you receive, by blocking known spam before it gets to you.
Well, our customer database is over a decade old, and we had many thousands of retired email addresses in it. It is a very bad idea to continually send e-mail to retired e-mail addresses, because this is exactly what spammers do, and it can get you put on a blacklist. Our mailing list is opt-in (you have to actually sign up for it, and you can unsubscribe at any time). So, one of the things this new software does is allows us to track which e-mail addresses are retired and remove them from our mailing list.
This is good because we aren’t then seen as spammers, and it also reduces the amount of time it takes for us to send the newsletter, which is always a good thing when you are sending thousands of e-mails at a time.
If you’d like to sign up for our e-mail newsletter, you can do so on our homepage, or by sending an e-mail with the word “subscribe” in the subject line to newslist@alabu.com. We send them out once a month, and sometimes they have coupons or other treats in them.
H.M.