Pavement mailing

Daniel sent over the latest "e-Blast" roster, this one coded for interest in pavement.

We tried including first and last names, with the idea that the To: field would show "Name ," since people are more likely to look at an email that has their real name in the To: field (and the email will get past spam filters more readily).

The Calmail web site says:

5. After choosing your preferred options, enter the email addresses (one per line) in the box provided. If you want to include a name with each address, make sure each line is in the following format:

   name <email_address>

   Note: Don't forget to include the brackets around the email addresses. For example:

   Joe User <joeuser@berkeley.edu>

   You can also choose to upload a file that contains your subscribers. The file must be plain text. The names and email addresses should be in the same format specified above.

It was at least twice as much work to clean the list: With email addresses only, spaces and commas are always wrong and can just be replaced with newlines. But there are a few ( ~ 5% ) names like "Kurt Dietrich, P.E." So I had to find and replace one by one. (158 comma-separated emails vs 146 commas/spaces/etc in names)

One unexpected behavior: it looks like CalMail ignores names when de-duping; it just zaps any duplicate email addresses.

So the following

Jason Wylie <blacey@crescentcity.org>
Kerry Cochrane <blacey@crescentcity.org>
Kevin Tupman <blacey@crescentcity.org>

all get crunched down to one address

blacey@crescentcity.org Regular Enabled

(with who knows which name?)

Anyway, the mailing went out, and my message (I am on the list for QA) arrived with To: ttpnewslist@techtransfer.berkeley.edu. (!!!)

Guess if we want names, it'll take more than that to achieve it!

ttp-news mailing list

Every month, we prepare an e-mail newsletter and mail it to ~9,000 subscribers.

The mailing list is kept in ACEware, but we use the campus GNU Mailman list manager to send the newsletter.

Every month, then, we need to move the mailing list from ACE to Mailman.

For future reference, here's what I did today:

1. Clean the list in a text editor (I used BBEdit)
zap "
replace , and ; with \r
look for illegal characters: [^a-zA-Z0-9\r.@_'-]
this also finds a pair of email addresses separated by a space and one by " or "
lowercase
sort
dedupe (184)

2. Manage mailing list
https://calmail.berkeley.edu/manage/list/mylists
log in as ttplists
choose ttp-news
choose Advanced
choose Bulk Remove
choose Remove all current subscribers (at bottom)
Submit
Now we're limited to adding 5,000 addresses at a time, so I cut 'n' paste into the web form instead of uploading a file
I get a proxy error every time, but when I check it has uploaded OK