[Web4lib] Administrivia: How to successfully mass mail your announcement

[Roy Tennant]

On a fairly regular basis I witness people attempting to send an
announcement to multiple mailing lists. Most of these end in failure for
Web4Lib, so I put together this list of things to do to give your
announcement the best chance of being posted.

1. Don¹t attach your announcement to your message. You may think that having
it formatted in some particular way is important, but most announcements
I¹ve seen aren¹t harmed very much by reducing them to plain text in the body
of the message. 
2. Don¹t use HTML ­ again, plain text provides the widest possible
acceptance by email lists and clients.
3. Don¹t send the message to multiple lists at once. If you do this when
mailing to Web4Lib, I can pretty much guarantee you that it won¹t get
through. The Mailman software is set up to trap messages sent to multiple
locations at once. Take the time to send it directly and individually to
each list to which you want it distributed. This does not take very long to
do and you will be much more successful.
4. Don¹t bcc mailing lists. Mailing list software such as Mailman will block
messages where the mailing list address is not in the ³To² field.
5. Make sure what you are announcing is appropriate to the topic of the
list(s) to which you are sending it.

If you follow the above guidelines, I can pretty much assure you that it
will get posted to Web4Lib. Thank you for your cooperation,
Roy Tennant
Web4Lib Owner