Re: Purging schedules

[Nick Simicich]

At 03:45 PM 2002-11-21 -0500, Beartooth wrote:

        I'm still running my little list entirely by hand, though I
still hope to automate it one day. My practice has been to send out
a purge notice about once a year, and replace the list with a new
one composed of those who reply to it, saying "keep me on." That
way anybody killfiling the list -- or worse, hitting delete on
sight every time -- gets off by default, and I have a manual form
of opt-in.

        Is that in line with what the big kids do, given my small
scale?

I personally think that reconfirmations are a bad idea. They increase the load on the subscribers without doing anything positive. Frankly, I do not even like the first of the month notifications from mailman. The only lists that should consider using those are ones that rarely get postings and want to insure that an address is not gapped so that an inheritor gets postings to a list they did not subscribe to, and you can simply send the notification as a posting to the list. In that case, the right frequency is about once a month.

        Some of the regulars have opted in half a dozen or more
times. I can give well over 99 44/100% odds they will again. Any
easy routine -- especially once I do automate (and, I hope, set the
purge to run at 365-day intervals as a cron job) to spare them the
bother?

Why do you bother in the first place? Are you using a service that charges you by the subscriber? I am on some lists (technical) that I do not read. I archive them on my own server, and I search the archives when I have a question to insure that the question is not recently asked-and-answered before asking. If they reconfirmed, I'd miss it and I'd be off the list. This list may have different characteristics, and a charter that requires that the people actually read the list. That is the only justification I can see for using reconfirmations.

You should be managing dead addresses with bounces, not reconfirmations. In fact, I consider the whole concept of reconfirmations and even periodic separate probes like listserv does (or at least, one listserv list that I am on does) to be essentially broken. Modern MLMs can probe properly for bounces using tags and VERP, if you are not using a MLM that is capable of using those techniques you should upgrade. If you are hand managing your subscriber list, you can hand manage your bounces as well and you can hand manage removing subscribers when the mail starts bouncing hard.

--
If you doubt that magnet therapy works, I put to you this observation: When refrigerators were first invented, in the 1940s, they were rather unreliable, but then they became significantly more reliable. The basic design of the refrigerator did not change, and we all know that quality was important back then, so I doubt that newer refrigerators are made better. Refrigerators have become more reliable because of the rise of the refrigerator magnet.
Nick Simicich - [EMAIL PROTECTED]