[Mailman-Users] Limited posting

Jon Carnes jonc at haht.com
Tue Oct 2 21:06:34 CEST 2001


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" <jim at ebizq.net>
To: "Amanda" <arandall at auntminnie.com>
Cc: <mailman-users at python.org>
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" <arandall at auntminnie.com>
> To: "Jim Kutter" <webmaster at ebizq.net>
> Cc: <mailman-users at python.org>
> 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  -  Mailman-Users at python.org
> > > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Mailman-Users maillist  -  Mailman-Users at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users





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