Too many emails? Please read anyway
Published: Mon, 03/12/18
I had someone unsubscribe from my email list after my posting last Wednesday. The one about my visit The Deep when I almost saw the Nautilus. I checked the reason for leaving the list and it just said. ‘Too many emails.’ Well, this is an email list (even if you are reading this on the archive having followed the link from Facebook.) So, that is a bit like walking out of a green grocers complaining of ‘too many vegetables’. Sending emails to subscribers to my email list is kind of the point. I do get regular responses saying thanks for what I share I am not complaining.
Too many emails is a fair comment as far as electronic communications generally as concerned. I have been trying to remember when I got my first email account. I think it was about 20 years ago. I was certainly making regular use of email by 2000 and I think I got my first email connection in about 1997 with a 486 computer. Email has actually been around since the 1960s when computers first started being connected together on a fairly wide scale. Universities were the early adopters but the coming of the wider internet in the 1980s saw the start of the email services we know and love/hate today.
Email is very useful in that it enables us to send messages pretty much instantly to anywhere on the planet for pretty much zero cost. That is pretty extraordinary achievement and one that most of us were grateful for and made responsible use of. What nearly ruined email was spam. For exactly the reasons I have just listed unscrupulous people could not resist sending out emails by the million, frequently advertising products such as online gambling, pornography and cures to impotence. People often thought that they must have made a mistake and had ‘given away’ their email somewhere. This did happen sometimes but in fact it is easy enough to harvest emails in various ways or even just generate them randomly.
Email traffic is now massively filtered which is why you do not receive anything like the same number of unsavory messages that you might have done a few years ago. It also means that you probably won’t get away with writing a message and just sending it to everyone in your address list. In fact any message with multiple recipients is likely to get caught in a spam filter and not be delivered.
So, how do I manage to maintain and use an email list like this one? I assume that you realise that just because your name is at the top this isn’t actually a personal message? Don’t take it personally if you didn’t I really do value having you on my list but I just don’t have time to write personally to over a hundred people every day. To be receiving this message you should have opted in and confirmed your willingness to be on this list. The messages are actually distributed by a registered company on my behalf (Aweber) in this case. A service I pay for. Each message also has a physical address at the bottom so if I was doing something illegal I can’t hide behind the anonymity of an email address.
Of course there are alternatives to email these days, Facebook and other social networking platforms being the obvious ones. The problem with social networking is that Facebook et al are not there to provide you with necessary service. They exist to make money through paid advertising and you provide the entertainment content which gets people onto the Facebook site. Your scope for communicating with people via facebook, if you have not paid for an advert, is a lot more limited than you might think. I am not criticizing Facebook, social networking is a business so how much do you expect to get from them for free?
I have been using email for over 20 years. I have been using Aweber’s autoresponder services for at least 5 years, some of you have been reading my posts for that long! I am now trying out using the autoresponder system for distributing a distance learning programme. I have just completed the first trial which I sent out manually, which did take quite a while each Monday morning.
So, what do we have? Ancient wisdom and knowledge of Stav disseminated using state of the art modern communications, that is the idea anyway.
If you are interested you can access the programme just as distance learning. Or, there will be a day course on the 26th of May to consolidate what you have learned and discuss the topics that will have been studied. Please check it out at https://iceandfire.org.uk/foundation.html
Regards
Graham
PS Now that I have completed the first programme I will be adding further opportunities for training in the different aspects of Stav using a similar format. More on these very soon.