Hi, oh list folk! Recently I have noticed a rise in problems (bounced messages, list mail ending up with spam) resulting from people sending email to the list that consists of a link and just a few words or a sentence or so of text.
While this form of message is super-common on social media, and lots of people compose and read email on their mobile devices (which perhaps over-encourages brevity), this type of message doesn't actually work well for mailing list traffic. Because... it looks like spam. Yep, the spammers have found Yet Another Way To Make Our Lives Miserable. They frequently send messages with a very low content-to-link ratio (very little text, with a link) and thus many over-aggressive anti-spam systems toss out anything with a similar structure, regardless of actual content. The solution: write some more text. Describe in more detail what the link points to; talk about how the contents have affected you; how you hope to use it; how others might use the content; if it's your material, talk about how you came up with it; etc. Make your message *commentary*, not just *passing something on*. You'll make the message look more like real mail, more people will actually have it delivered to their inbox, and you'll make your message itself (and not just the thing it's linked to) actually interesting to read. Everybody wins! It may take a bit more time (and who has it to spare, these days?) but we like to think that the O-list community is worth it. (Oh, and don't forget to insert the link in plain text; if you don't see the http://www.... and all, it's not plain text.) Thanks. Now go fold something - and if you link to it, tell us about it, too! Anne
