Making a list, annoying me twice

(It's time for the Amish Tech Support Blog A Day Tour! Here's Laurence Simon's post for the day...)

Know what's really annoying?

I am signed up for a bunch of mailing lists for all sorts of subjects: humor, news, jobs, sports, local events, and everything under the sun. My mail program of choice has a bunch of filtering rules in there to keep everything sorted into its own folder by subject, flagging items that seem out of the ordinary or important.

I hate it when one of these services switches providers or mucks with their subject line so that I've got to go into my filters and change everything around. My mail Inbox starts to fill up with this stuff, and I end up sometimes getting it confused with the Spam when it's time for the Daily Delete Dance. Sure, it's nice to have a service add the "Reply to this message to delete your subscription" byt that often mucks with my filter.

I also hate it when it's impossible to split apart various mailing lists from a single service. It takes some tweaking to get my EMAZING Recipes separated from the EMAZING Tech Tips.

Finally, the subject lines of each mailing out to have a hint as to the contents instead of "X of the Day for Schnebuary 32, 2003." It's so much easier to find something in the archives if the subject line has "Spanish-Fried Mole Rats In Bacon-grease" for a recipe instead of just a date.

To recap:

• Make it easy for a person to filter your messages
• Make the subject lines relevant to the content
• If you run multiple lists, make it easy to identify each individual list instead of using a single from address.
• If you're planning on changing anything, send out a notice beforehand instead of changing mid-stream.

If you're thinking of running a mailing list, keep all this in mind, please. Oh, and happy President's Day.

(I was going to make this post about when to upgrade and when not to upgrade, considering today 2.61 of MT got released for all those who just jumped to 2.6, but I'll deal with that subject another time.)