I hate to say this, as I totally despise spam but... to get a truly accurate count of folks who really open or at least preview the message, send the message as html and include a link to a tiny gif on one of your web servers. Place the gif somewhere unobtrusive in the message, like at the very end. The text of the message will always show up and as folks read the message, their machines will automatically download the gif. Actually, just previewing it will cause the gif to be downloaded.
Now setup your web server to count the number times its accessed, and store the ip addresses of the folks accessing it. Assuming you have a decent web server, folks will never notice, and you'll have a much more accurate account of folks who read your message. You'll have the time they opened the message and even have a log of their IP addresses (or more probably the IP address of their ISP or firewall). Anyway, marketing guys go bonkers over this kind of stuff. Enjoy. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Kutter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Amanda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 2:30 PM Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Limited posting > Ok. Interesting. I think I will look into procmail to filter out garbage since I want unsibscribe requests and the like to go to a tech support mail account. > > That brings me to another question - what's an accurate method of counting the number of bounces? I was grepping the bounce log and counting the number of bounces for my newsletter. That will only work however if I wipe the bounce log every few days - and even then I won't get a very accurate count... Also - as far as stats go, in the smtp log, is that a fair count for how many messages really got sent? I don't care so much about how many people actually read the messages, but my sales team wants a fairly accurate count of how many people are really getting the newsletter... > > Thanks > -jim > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Amanda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "Jim Kutter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 12:11 PM > Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Limited posting > > > > This sounds familiar! Only we get ~1800 per edition of newsletter... doctors really love their "Your message has been received" and "I'm out of the office today" vacation settings. :-) > > > > Quick and dirty answer - you could set your Reply-To to some other location. That will of course direct not only the vacation messaging, receipt-acknowledgements, and other bargle to that reply-to, but also all the unsubscribes, tech-question mail, and whatnot. You *can * route it to the bitbucket if you like (e.g. an alias that points to /dev/null) or you can route it to a box you can > > sift through (manually or otherwise) at your convenience. > > > > Bounce and rejection notices should still come back to the apparent sender of the message (in your case, listowner), which can be handy if you want to count bounces (which we do). > > > > =) > > Amanda > > > > > > Jim Kutter wrote: > > > > > Hello again folks. You've all been tremendous help for me recently, but I have a another question. > > > > > > I am using mailman to manage a newsletter list (with some other lists - but that's the primary use), and obviously I don't want to allow public postings to a newsletter. So I set the e-mail address of the person who composes the newsletter as the only one allowed to post to the list. So, in order to protect my users from their users :) I set the list to hide the sender of the message. > > > > > > So here's the problem - the newsletters go out saying they're from newsletter-owner, and the admin of the list (me) gets all the "Out of office", "remove me pls!", "undeliverable" et al. This amounts to ~400 e-mails whenever the letter goes out... > > > > > > Any suggestions? > > > > > > Thanks > > > -jim > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------ > > > Mailman-Users maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users > > > ------------------------------------------------------ > Mailman-Users maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
