Choosing the right email listserv

I am doing a seminar tonight here in St. Louis that talks about how to use blogs and other Internet tools for self-published authors. And one of the first things that I wanted to talk about has to do with email lists. Ironic, but the underpinning of Web 2.0 is something so old that we take it for granted.

Email is at the core of just about anything else that you do on the Web: it is the primary notification mechanism for Facebook et al. when you make changes to your site. It is the way these social sites find your network of contacts, and the way that you keep your audience informed of what you are doing, too. You can have the best Web site going, but you need to remind people about what you have on it. Ironically, that was the original reason that I started Web Informant lo’ those many years ago.

Why bother with an email list when you can just send out a bunch of emails from your desktop? Several reasons: First, you get a more professional means of communication that can manage all the bounces and mistaken reply-to-everyone situations. Your desktop program isn’t designed to send out a message to hundreds or thousands of recipients either, while the list servers are. You also don’t have to reveal all your subscribers in the “To:” field, which I still see from certain PR people. (Hey, thanks for sending me your contact list! I will be sure to take note of whom you think are my colleagues.) Finally, a list server or list provider can manage unsubscribes automatically, as well as post your messages in an archive that is available online for anyone to review.

Over the years I have used many different technologies to maintain this humble email list, so I have had some experience with the technology. If you are starting a new list, you have three basic choices: the free, the cheap, and the pricey. While price alone is a good way to decide, there are some other reasons that are less obvious. Let’s talk about a few typical providers for each category: Google and Yahoo Groups (free), Mailman hosted by EMWD.com for $4 a month and iContact. If you don’t want to read how to do this and want to watch one of my screencast videos that actually shows you the process, go on over to http://yourpersonalgeek.tv now.

No matter what method you choose, you will need to assemble all your email addresses that you want to start your list with. You can export these from your email program into a text file, and then bring up the file in a word processor program. The first time that you do this is painful, no doubt. You have to cull through all your correspondence, and I guarantee you that many of your addresses will be outdated, given how quickly people change jobs these days.

For free list servers, I like Yahoo Groups. It offers a lot of control, easy list management, and the Web-based control screens are easy to understand and figure out where things are located. There is one big downside, though — the ability to set up large lists quickly. Yahoo only lets you add 10 people a day to your list without asking them to opt-in. To get around this, you can use Google Groups, which supports lists up to 500 names. Google Groups has fewer features though. I use Yahoo Groups for supporting many community lists that I maintain.

To get started, go to groups.google.com or groups.yahoo.com and click on the create a new group button at the top of the page and fill out the form. You can cut and paste the email addresses from your master list right in the Web form and you are ready to go. With both Google and Yahoo, you have a few parameters that you want to make sure you set correctly in terms of who can join your list and how they see messages from you. I suggest you experiment with just a few names as a test before you add the entire list so you can get the hang of things.

Mailman is a more professional program and gives you all sorts of control over the message and recipients, and it is what I currently use for this list. I recommend the provider EMWD.com – there are others but they are more expensive. You need to obtain an account for $10, and this will give you access via the Web to a series of control screens, fill-in forms, and zillions of parameters. This is more complex than Google, but you have more control.  As I said, each list only costs $4 a month to operate. You need to set up a subdomain that points to their list server, and you can usually do that with your registrar’s control panels.

But this may not be fancy enough for your purposes. If you want to add Web links in your emails and track who clicks on which link, such as for promotional purposes, then you want iContact. I personally don’t like rich HTML emails but I know many of you want this, so I mention it here. The cheapest plan is $10 a month for up to 500 names. If you have 2500 names, the fee increases to $30 a month.  The more names, the more you pay a month. The advantage of iContact is that you can send out very snazzy emails, with pictures, color, and links to Web sites, and maintaining lists is all they do. You don’t have to mess with setting up domains or servers, either. And like the others, everything is set up with a series of Web forms that are fairly easy, with lots of control over how the newsletter will look like.

So there you have it. Good luck with your list.

How to reach your social network

I am still a bit slammed from the time travel back from the land of Oz. In my midnight sleepless surfing, I have come across a brainstorm: there is no single ‘killer app’ for social networks. The trouble is that there is no single solution for maintaining one’s electronic connections, mainly because different people require different communications methods. I guess I needed to travel thousands of miles around the world to realize something so simple.

Some of us are trying to conduct all of our social intercourse using one application. Jeff Pulver has moved over to Facebook and won’t respond to emails any longer. Paul Gillin and I just did an interview with Laura Fitton on our TechPR War Stories podcasts (it will be posted later this week), and she swears by Twitter as her main communications tool. And others are champions of LinkedIn with thousands of contacts, or have to prune their Instant Messaging buddy lists to keep it from scrolling into eternity. These are still very much extreme cases.

I would venture to guess that most of you are like me and still using a bunch of different mechanisms, including phone and (gosh) fax, to stay in touch with our electronic ‘hoods. Part of the reason for this is that we have different requirements that trade off immediacy (this is where the Twitter crowd likes to live) with depth and time to reflect on our correspondence. Another issue is that many of you don’t use a single communications mechanism either, and can’t force everyone in your network to convert to one system (although Pulver claims success with Facebook).

I’ve also seen what I call the natural evolution of social networks that has taken place over the past couple of years. This evolution happens like this: first you sign up with LinkedIn, because you are thinking of changing jobs and want to start updating your electronic resume. Then you begin to get involved with Facebook, and import your contacts into both and start to build your network of friends and business associates. In the meantime, you start to keep track of your emails, because eventually you will need to decide whether to maintain your identity with your current work email or to create a new personal Gmail or Yahoo email for people to continue to talk to you when you do change jobs.

But I digress. Getting back to the subject at hand, many people are still adjusting to the jump from phone to email as their main communications tool. And they aren’t eager to make another sea change in their lives, which is why email still is the undisputed champion of how I interact with most of my audience, and one of the reasons why I still send out these missives via an email list to this very day.

Students of social networks should study the rise and fall of push technology to gain some perspective. Remember when push was going to change the way world communicated? It went from darling to despised in about two months; long enough to make the cover of Wired magazine and have me proclaim that I was going to convert Web Informant to a push-only version.  (That lasted through about 20 issues, before I regained my senses and continued the email list that you are on now.)

I wrote this ten years ago in WI #101:

Push products had plenty of problems. They really didn’t have the publishing tools at all. You often didn’t know who your audience is, couldn’t tell what software they used to view your content, and often preparing content took loads of time and was also a hit or miss proposition. Most of the products couldn’t even tell you whether your readers actually received your content, let alone if they spent any time reading it. Try doing this with a print publisher or television producer and see how long you stay in business.

The same could be said for many of the social networking applications in use today.  You can’t use any of them as a publishing platform, although many of you are trying.

I also find that one’s communication mechanism of choice depends on generational issues. Teens are still the biggest users of IM. 20-somethings text, then Facebook, then maybe IM (although my daughter tells me that IM is so over, daaad!). Email is almost never in the picture: when I need to send my daughter an email, I usually have to IM or call her about it. On one of my flights there were a bunch of teens traveling together and they were comparing the features of their phones. They sounded like IT managers talking about their computing strategies, only with a lot more “likes” inserted into the dialogue.

My 15-year old niece is a communications junkie, caught at the crossroads of many technologies. She is online with her best friend across town via video chat. She Skype’s and IM’s my daughter all the time. She has a Facebook page (that I am not allowed to frequent). She has been through several smart phones and run up huge texting bills. Email? I don’t think she bothers to check it more than once in a blue moon.

The 30- and 40-somethings go for IM, then maybe email and texting from their phones. Some of them are picking up on Twitter, others on Facebook, but that is still new territory. Those of us 50-somethings are solid email users, for the most part, although a few of my generation still prefer phone calls and even have personal assistants to screen their calls too, those dinosaurs.

It has been a while since I got a cold phone call from a PR person – in fact, I am glad that my phone is mostly silent these days. That might change now that I am appearing more in the print Baseline magazine and that number is listed on the masthead, but I don’t think so – most of the pitches I get still come via email, although some PR people are beginning to use IM and Facebook to send inquires my way. Bring them on, I say.

So my revelation is that social networks will continue to multiply and attempt to capture all these various dimensions of our normal social interaction. But no one system will be all things for everyone, now or forever. And that means that more of our electronic workday will be spent using a variety of tools to process all this information, just to stay in touch with our would-be friends.

Ten years of corporate email progress

I am off to Australia later this week, in preparation of a series of seminars that Joel Snyder and I will be doing there. My portion of the talks will focus on email and file encryption. Australia is in the process of beefing up their privacy laws and creating a uniform code for the entire country that will necessitate deploying encryption for most business communications.

The trip comes almost ten years to the day that I started working on my book “Internet Messaging” with Marshall Rose, who was one of the inventors of the POP protocol, the underlying fabric of what every Internet email product uses today. So I thought it would be worthwhile to see where we have come in the last ten years with corporate email.

Ten years is a couple of lifetimes in the tech world, but it is interesting how much hasn’t changed in the corporate email universe.

Sure, some products have left the landscape: Netscape Messenger and CompuServe’s WinCIM have been replaced by Google’s Gmail and other Web-based emailers. Microsoft Exchange has taken plenty of market share from Notes, now firmly part of IBM’s software product line and Groupwise is nearly extinct. The notion of primarily LAN-based email, such as cc:Mail and MHS, is also gone.

Ten years ago, we had spotty Internet connectivity and unreliable gateways. Now it is taken for granted, intrinsic to any real email product, and no one would roll out email in their organization without it. Email used to be part of a secure perimeter of services that a corporation could protect and defend. As the level of Internet integration has increased, the perimeter is no more, and now corporations are trying to implement endpoint security measures.

Many businesses are running Internet-only email products such as Communigate, which works with Microsoft Outlook and Internet clients. Ten years ago, cell phones were still used mostly for voice calls: now texting and IM’ing from a phone predominates, and applications such as Twitter make it easy for people to communicate their doings in real time to a mass audience.

Speaking of Instant Messaging, it has become firmly rooted in many corporate cultures, largely because the email traffic has ballooned beyond control and because people want immediate real-time answers from their co-workers. And as corporate teams have become more distributed, IM can connect them in ways that email never could.

Ten years ago, we were careful about putting personal information online, because for many people it was still a pretty new experience, and because people who participated in Usenet discussions knew their words would be recorded for posterity. Now Usenet is the province of spammers, porn and peer file stealing services, replaced by Facebook and other social networks. And nowadays we have become careless and give out routinely this information, especially as teens and college students dominate in these applications. We have already seen some privacy implications and more are on their way.

Today we see situations where our IP address, our online purchase history, our postal address, and various account numbers are included in email messages that anyone can easily read with the right tools and time and determination. The proposed Australian laws, as an example, are making collecting customer information more of a liability than an asset for corporations that want to do business inside their country.

Rich email – the ability to send a message with clickable links and graphics – has become de rigueur, but spammers and phishers have made it less desirable by embedding their malware into these links.

Speaking of spam, that hasn’t changed much in ten years, only just more of the mail stream than ever. There are dozens of tools to try to block and cleanse this junk, but it still is a war of attrition and an arms race to stay ahead of spammers.

Another thing that hasn’t changed much in ten years is email encryption. PGP Corporation has gone through several transformations of its own in the past ten years, and now has a wider product line, including its Universal product and other tools to manage the crypto infrastructure. Companies such as IronPort (now a part of the growing Cisco family), Tumbleweed, and Voltage Security are making a good living selling corporate solutions that offer some form of encryption products.

Despite all of these products being far better than they were ten years ago, for the most encrypted email is still nowhere to be found, and is still implemented only in the rarest of circumstances. I think I can count on one hand the number of people who I regularly correspond with encrypted emails, and that is probably being generous.

In the ideal world, email encryption would be available for communication anytime and from any machine, not just the PCs that are running specialized software tools. It would work across different products with some level of confidence. A product would allow its users to provision themselves without having to call in IT support or someone who could wade through all the numerous options. It would be easily managed by thinning IT staffs or outsourced to competent staffs, and available at low cost too. None of these statements were true ten years ago, and they still are largely unrealized today.

Finally, one thing that remains constant is how email is the universal notification system for so many applications that we now use. Most of the social networks can be set up to send you email when a friend joins your network, or adds you to theirs. Everything from shared document services to Internet faxing to common calendars to CRM tools makes use of email messaging infrastructure in some fashion.

Email authentication takes a small step forward

I haven’t worked with Dave Crocker in a long time, and it is nice to catch up with what he is doing, particularly the whole Domain Keys effort to try to get email sender authentication standards. A working group of 20 of the largest emailers, including Yahoo, Google, AOL, and Sendmail, gathered together this past week in Dallas to try to iron out interoperability issues. While this is “just small brick in a very big wall” according to Crocker, it is a positive step towards fighting spam and reclaiming email as a useful tool from the spammers and scammers.

IMAP for GMail

For those of you that use Gmail, this is great news indeed.

Channel chat podcast: TM Ravi, Mimosa Systems

We talk to T.M. Ravi, CEO, Mimosa Systems about email archiving partnering opportunities. E-mail systems are not designed for long-term storage and retrieval, but e-mail is an asset that needs to be archivable and discoverable, in another in our series of podcasts for Ziff’s IT Link community site.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Take this phishing test

The folks at MailFrontier, now Sonicwall, have put together this test to see how good you are at distinguishing real emails from phishy ones. It isn’t as easy as you might think. I won’t reveal my score here, but it wasn’t pretty.

Email Koyaanisqatsi

When someone sends you an email, when should they expect a reply? Within an hour? A day? It is a simple question, but the answer (and you can send them to me via email if you’d like) isn’t.

I think most of us try to respond within a business day, and if we get the email early enough, by the close of that day too. It is a pretty good rule of thumb.

But then some of us expect a response even quicker, and get annoyed or impatient of the delay. To me, this represents something out of balance, like some scenes from the movie Koyaanisqatsi. (Little ironies department: I now live about a mile from the former site of Pruitt-Igoe made famous in the movie.)

I was talking to a colleague yesterday about how she often replies to her emails late at night, after her husband has gone to sleep. It made me think about how often I reply to emails in the early morning, before my own wife awakes.

And how many of us can’t leave the laptop home when we go on vacation for fear of the massive email pile-up that will await us upon our return? Or who can’t help ourselves but “multitask” during meetings and clear our inboxes when we are supposed to be part of the meeting itself?

There are some that are hyperactive email responders, carrying BlackBerries and being reachable 24×7. You know who you are.

Is this healthy? I am beginning to wonder.

The irony is that I have come full circle on email responsiveness. Back in the early days of my own email use, I tried to respond to every email that I received within a few hours. This is the early 1980s, when the Internet was still a DoD science project, and few people had the ability to send messages between corporations, let alone across the world. It was still a novelty then.

In the early 1990s, I had an Internet-reachable email address, actually several. When I started Network Computing magazine, we were one of the first magazines to include email addresses of the authors for each article, which was also novel concept then. Now you can find them for the bylines in my local paper. I was also an early user of the BlackBerry precursor, called Radiomail. I remember one time pulling over at one toll plaza on the Garden State Parkway to answer some emails. A curious cop came over and was wondering what I was doing.

Back when Computer Associates (now called just CA) first implemented their email network, they actually turned the system off for several hours during the workday because they wanted their staff to get work done. This was before various executives were caught cooking the books, so I guess it worked too well. They eventually stopped doing this, and now email is available 24×7, just like everywhere else.

The email landscape sure has changed since then and what was novel is now de rigueur. Today most of us think nothing about emailing people that are halfway around the world, and of course now I get spam in about a dozen different languages, if I could figure out the character sets that come into my inbox.

The trick to being successful with email can be summed up with one word: balance. Or getting back into email balance.

“I do however still get a chuckle by those who complain they can’t get work done at the office, yet are sending personal emails out all day long,” says Rich DiGirolamo, who writes a very amusing email newsletter and is a professional keynote speaker. “Some of us make every effort to answer every email within twenty-four hours, but at times we need to prioritize them. Yours just may not be as important to me as you think it is. But it will get answered, I promise.”

I think that is a great strategy. I recommend setting aside some time every day to read your emails, and perhaps a separate time to write replies. But don’t let it bleed into the entire day.

Maybe we need an email rehab center in Malibu to help those that need to get their lives back into balance.

Email systems I have known and discarded

Mike Krieger at Z-D and I have had a series of amusing emails recalling all the various email systems down through the years that we have known, used, and abused. He goes back to the dawn of connected email with IBM mainframe systems PROFS and DISOSS. When I was first living in LA, Mike was an SE for IBM midrange systems and we both used these beasts.

Here are a few other systems to jog your memories this morning:

Easymail (AT&T)
MCImail
Radiomail (precursor to BlackBerries)
The Source
CompuServ
Prodigy
AOL
Higgins
cc:mail
Fidonet

Not to mention all the various BBS’s that were floating around back then. And speaking of BBS, you might want to take a look at this movie here.

IM Interoperability Status Report

Today, the instant messenger world is about where the email world was in the early 1990s. For those of you not around then, MCIMail became one of the first private email companies to connect to the Internet and offer the means to bridge incompatible systems. Then the flood started, and eventually the TCP/IP and POP worlds became the default and no one cared about proprietary systems.

Now Vint Cerf is with Google, and MCIMail (his former home and pet project) is largely forgotten. With the advent of Jabber-based XMPP messaging systems (here is a complete list), and with the work of Apple, IBM, and others, we are now seeing software that can connect multiple IM systems, although it still is pretty crude. The issue is more than just the protocol, you need federated identity between disparate systems to make this all work.

I looked at five products that are available on Windows clients (Google Talk, Gizmo Project, AIM, Skype and Trillian Pro), along with Apple’s iChat. Three of the Windows products are also available on other platforms. All do basic chat or text messages from person to person. Some offer audio and video conferencing features, whereby you can connect multiple people on the same line. Two offer the built-in ability to record your text chats and also record your audio conversations, which are useful for assembling podcasts. And two also offer voicemail systems, so when you are away from your computer you can still receive audio messages.

Just as we were with email in the early 1990s, there are three commercial IM systems that don’t really connect with each other: AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Then Trillian came along a few years ago and produced a single client that allowed you to chat with all three, along with ICQ. Then came Skype, which set things back as its own communications island, but moved chat into a features war with lots of enhancements, including voice conferencing and dial in/dial out features. And now we have all the jabbering Jabber clients, including Gizmo Project, which takes most of Skype’s features a step further but is notably missing file transfer.

Eventually, I will add more to this grid, but this should whet your appetite for what you can do. You can find the page here on my site