Board-Wide Emails FYI

[BlueEye]

Hello LOU members,

I wanted to just talk quickly about an issue that I have recently identified with respect to our current board-wide emails we send out (State of the LOU). For those of you who don't know, I am the lead email marketing consultant for Mill Creek Country Club. I handle everything to do with their emails and thus through my experiences with them has taught me the legal boundaries of the business.

As many of you know, SPAM is illegal and everyone out there has the legal right to not receive emails from a given sender if they choose. When people sign up for an account on LOU they agree to our terms of service which states we can use their email address to contact them if we choose. The problem lies in those who do not want to receive emails from us but still want to be a part of the board. There is no option built into our current software that would allow us to "not send" the board-wide email to those who don't want it. The only option to remove them from our current board-wide emails would be to delete their account (and subsequently all their posts).

A better alternative for everyone has been my most recent project. That is the setup of a separate email hosting service. While this does cost me a lot of money (currently at $50/month and growing), it protects us on the legal front (giving users an "unsubscribe" option) AND provides us the opportunity to send out much more detailed and graphically enhanced campaigns. Currently we are limited to text only. While this is fine by some, others see a bunch of text and simply delete the email with no interest in reading though it.

The new email marketing service allows also to take 100% of the server load off our Dedicated Virtual server and onto their power servers built SPECIFICALLY for emails. So not only will the email be more detailed and legally compliant but they will also get sent out instantly to everyone with the ability to track who has valid email addresses and who doesn't. Those who do not are most likely spammers from the previous board (phpBB 2.0.23) and we can then delete those inactive fake accounts.

So as you can see it serves us well on several fronts. You can look forward to receiving your first LOU email from the new system probably sometime next week at the latest.

Just an FYI

Thanks -

Chad