[conspire] (forw) On methods for sending press releases

[Peter Knaggs]

Hi Rick,

I haven't tried them, but those instructions appear to fall into
the "now you go hunt for the missing piece" category.

Reading the last two steps of

 http://www.techerator.com/2009/06/how-to-automatically-forward-emails-to-multiple-recipients-in-gmail/

it says:
   "Don’t worry, we’ll add the other addresses in the next step.
Click Create Filter."
but on the next step, it says:
   "Repeat this process for any additional email addresses you want to
forward messages to."

That would presumably mean creating _more_ filters, which wouldn't appear to
help much to reduce the work of forwarding email to multiple addresses
in one shot.

Perhaps they meant "edit the existing filter" to add more recipient
email addresses to it?

Cheers,
Peter.


On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 7:40 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> While I'm on about e-mail.  (People from LUGs who send out announcements
> to lots of places, please take note!)
>
> ('Renovation' is the name of this year's World Science Fiction
> Convention, which will be this August in Reno.  See:
> http://www.renovationsf.org/ )
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----
>
> Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:30:20 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: press at renovationsf.org
> Subject: On methods for sending press releases
>
> Hi, good people!  I'm writing in my capacity as BayCon's mail
> administrator.  (This is not any type of complaint.  I'm just
> offering some thoughts and suggestions.)
>
> Renovation was grappling, here, with a frequently encountered problem:
> How to send out a single mail to a number of unrelated addressees,
> without creating collateral damage.  The solution you folks employed was
> the 'Bcc' one.  That is, received headers included:
>
>  Received: from mail-qy0-f178.google.com (mail-qy0-f178.google.com
>        [209.85.216.178])
>        by harwood.textdrive.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9D1DE33D4A
>        for <info at baycon.org>; Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:47:21 +0000 (GMT)
>  From: Renovation Press <press at renovationsf.org>
>  To: press at renovationsf.org
>
> In other words, you sent out (from GMail) a broadcast mail, addressed
> directly only to yourself, but with a presumably long CC list stating
> the real intended recipients including info at baycon.org .
>
> This is a pretty good solution, and I've used it myself.  It avoids
> inadvertently creating a party-line discussion forum if any of the
> recipients is dumb enough to reply-all.  There are two drawbacks:
>
> 1.  In the modern Internet, Bcc'd mail often gets quarantined as
> suspected of being spam.  Sad, but true -- and partly because spammers
> themselves abuse the method.
>
> 2.  If any of the recipients turn out to be mailing lists, they will
> automatically hold the message for manual administrator attention.
> Again, this is fallout from Bcc having a bad spam reputation, and
> the mailing list software will cite the reason 'Message has implicit
> destination'.
>
> As it happens, BayCon currently directs the 'info at baycon.org' contact
> address to the bc11-info at lists.baycon.org mailing list, where it was
> indeed held for my manual attention even though we deliberately
> whitelist mail from Renovation.
>
>
> What's the alternative to Bcc, you might ask?  I'm afraid the best
> alternatives aren't easily implemented by GMail users.
>
> There are only four ways to broadcast such mail:
>
> 1.  A crosspost using To or Cc headers.  Not good because of the 'party-line'
>    effect (and revealing your distribution roster to everyone).
> 2.  A crosspost using Bcc headers.  As noted.
> 3.  Set up and use an outbound mailing list to send press releases.
>    (This is a fine solution if you're a sysadmin; not so much if
>    you're a GMail user.)
> 4.  Multiposting.
>
> Multiposting is a sort of 'mailmerge' where you create a template for
> the mail and then send n copies, one e-mail addressed 'To' each of the
> intended recipients.  This gives you the best of all worlds -- except
> that you have to manage the mechanics of sending out n e-mails that are
> identical except for sporting individualised 'To' headers.
>
> Not being a GMail user, I was originally stymied when contemplating how
> to multipost using GMail's Web interface.  At the Unix command line, it's
> dead simple, but a Web interface foils that option.  However, it turns
> out that GMail _does have_ a built-in option for 'forwarding' to multiple
> addresses simultaneously, detailed here:
>
> http://www.techerator.com/2009/06/how-to-automatically-forward-emails-to-multiple-recipients-in-gmail/
>
> I hope that will prove useful to you.
>
> Best Regards,
> Rick M.
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
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