About Bread ‘n Molasses . . .

I slept a little late on Saturday so I didn’t get started on it until after noon. But I worked the rest of the day and all evening until about 11pm, mostly on the Tall Ships story, so I could put the issue to bed and send out the email to all our subscribers.

I got the article and all the pictures up, but I didn’t get the email out. I planned to send it first thing Sunday morning. But in its typical way, life decided it had other plans for me on Sunday, so I couldn’t get to work on the email until late afternoon. And it was after supper before it got sent.

Today is a busy day for me because it’s the first day after Bread ‘n Molasses goes live. I have about 30 returned email messages from the Postmaster in my inbox that I need to deal with. Whenever I send an email to our subscriber list, some always bounce back — like Return to Sender in the good old days.

Some of these messages come back because the subscribers email box is full. I usually keep a record of these and send the email again next week, hoping that they will check their email and delete some messages before then. Most of the time that works, but there are some people who never get the email — it always bounces back because their email is always full.

I should probably just delete their email address from the list and be done with it. Actually, I did that before when I noticed the same email address bouncing every month. But the odd thing is these people want to be on the list. They ask to be put on the list every time anyone from the office meets up with them.

So, what am I to do? I can’t check their email for them. They want to be on the list. They bounce every time. I throw up my hands and shrug — let it be!

A lot of the bounced messages tell me the subscribers email address is invalid or unknown, and these are the ones I need to really deal with. I have to find them on the master list and delete them. That’s what I’m doing right now.

Because I’m home, working on dial-up, there’s a lot of time between look-ups and deletions to blog and tell you all about the exciting world of list administration! Aren’t you lucky? J

What I’m noticing about these unknown and invalid email addresses is that nearly all of them are Hotmail accounts. Hmmm. What does this mean?

Recently, I heard something about Hotmail and email newsletters, I can’t remember what exactly. It seems like they were considering only allowing email through that was flagged on the recipient’s Friends list. Did anyone else hear anything like that?

That would explain why nearly all the returned email is coming from Hotmail. Or it could just be that people have forgotten about their Hotmail accounts so they were shut down. That happens a lot.

Anyway, my list administration is complete for another month. The next step is to contact all the regular contributors and touch base as we start down the long twisted road to the September Bread ‘n Molasses.

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