Office and Enterprise Systems

1 An electronic mailing list is a way to distribute information to many Internet users using email. It is a list of names and addresses, similar to a traditional mailing list and works using a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the subscribers. There are basically two types of lists Announcement lists, used primarily as a one-way conduit of information and may only be "posted to" by selected people. This may also be referred to by the term newsletter. As we will see later, newsletter and promotional emailing lists are employed in various sectors as parts of direct marketing campaigns. Discussion lists, in which any subscriber may post. On a discussion list, a subscriber uses the mailing list to send messages to all the other subscribers, who may answer in similar fashion. Thus, actual discussion and information exchanges can happen. Mailing lists of this type are usually topic-oriented and store a copy of all messages sent in a way that any member can read them in the form of an online bulletin board. They are similar to Usenet newsgroups and can support threaded discussion forums. Discussion lists often require every message to be approved by a moderator before being sent to the rest of the subscribers (moderated lists), although higher-traffic lists typically only moderate messages from new subscribers. Google Groups is an example of a free electronic mailing list service. 2 E-mail marketing is still one of the key components of digital marketing. Giving your customers a good reason to give you their names and emails and sending them an engaging newsletter with the right amount of information and advertising is crucial for a successful digital strategy. There are websites like Mailchimp or Rapidmail created to help you with your email campaigns that let you create a visually appealing email and send it to different groups of users for a very low price per email (with mailchimp you even have a free plan for low volume campaigns). They also have tools to help you maintain your emails database. It is very important that you have the consent from every user included in your lists and that every message that you send has a mechanism to opt-out from the list if you don’t want your messages to be classified as SPAM. If you want to have a good opening rate (that is the number of users that open your emails out of the number of messages sent) and a good click through rate (the number of users that click on the link or links included in the message out of the number of users that open it), you must segment your users and send them targeted messages that are visually appealing and with content that is valuable for them. 3 E-mail is a very useful tool and a very powerful communication media, but the characteristics that make it so good are also the source of its problems. The main problem of e-mail is saturation, mainly by unsolicited email known as SPAM. Its main source is commercial bulk email sent by the million by advertising companies using mailing lists because, as sending millions of emails is very easy and cheap, they make money even with opening rates as low as 0,01%. If the junk email contains disguised links that seem to lead to one website but really send the reader to another, the phenomenon is known as phishing. If the email tries to gain your confidence to defraud you, they are known as SCAM. The images and other embedded content can signal the sender that a mail has been read and that is why a lot of email clients ask you before opening this type of content. There is a black market of email addresses, that are harvested automatically and sold to the advertisers. If an email address is known to open emails it is more valuable, as they know their message is reaching someone. That is why it is better not to respond, click on any link or open any image from a SPAM email. You can also find emails with attached documents or links that contain a computer virus. The best advice is not to open any document or follow any link on an email sent by an unknown source, and if we receive an email from a known source that looks weird, ask the sender before opening any attached document or following any link, as sender email can be forged easily. Another typical problem of email is the propagation of false information masqueraded as true, in the form of hoaxes or urban legends. Everybody has received the typical chain mail asking for help for a puppy or talking about the food that is served in some fast food restaurant chain. The best way to check if something that your auntie has sent you is true is to copy a part of that text and paste it in Google search adding the word hoax. The e-mail community works hard to try to solve the problem of unsolicited mail, and has implemented several measures to mitigate it such as analyzing the structure and content of SPAM messages to find some features that characterize them and use these features to program anti SPAM filters in mail servers and clients; create and maintain black lists of mail servers that are known to send spam or create mail server authentication protocols to ensure that a message comes from an authorized mail server for the domain that appears in its from: field. But it is a never-ending race between spammers and email administrators. Even the governments have tried to regulate the use of email for unsolicited marketing communications. In the United States the CAN-SPAM Act was signed into law in 2003 to regulate commercial messages. 4 5 .

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