Address Management

Compounding these problems is another series that relates to keeping track of your correspondent’s addresses. When you start to think about this, you probably have e-mail addresses tucked away in many different corners of your hard disk. The logical first place to start is in the address book or corporate directory of whatever e-mail software you are using. But you might have more than one e-mail program. Then which address book is the more current one? You also may have stored e-mail information in whatever software you use to maintain your own Rolodex, contact manager, customer database or accounting system. You may even have e-mail addresses stored in spreadsheets and Word documents. Remembering which address is the most current one for your correspondents is not always easy.

On top of this, there are times that you’d like to import addresses from other electronic sources, or export your e-mail address book to other programs. We’ll cover these issues later, but many products either don’t allow this or don’t have very sophisticated tools to cope with any kind of address book manipulation.

In the ideal world, you would like to be able to search through your address lists with a variety of methods. For example, as you type an address, the software automatically brings you to that portion of the list that matches what you type. In the early days of e-mail, cc:Mail was one of the first products to offer such a feature and now more products have it.

Or perhaps you would like to use a search tool to find all matches with wildcards of particular addresses, as you would use the search tool in Windows Explorer or inside your word processor. For example, you would look for *@example.com to find all the addresses you know that are part of the example.com domain and work for the Example Corporation. Yes, it would be nice. Most products don’t offer anywhere near the sophistication and utility of your average word processor or even a simple database for these kind of searches.

And we haven’t even mentioned all the nonelectronic sources of e-mail addresses, including your physical files that contain business cards, letterhead and scribbled notes with e-mail addresses too. What a mess! In order for mailing lists to work, you need to centralize where all these addresses are kept, and work at keeping them up to date. We’ll talk more about that later in the chapter.

Creating the list is only really half of the problem. The other half is understanding the process by which e-mail gets sent to each member on the list. Some e-mail products send a sequence of separate messages, one message to each recipient on the list. Some send a single message, with the entire list of recipients specified in the e-mail To: field (or wherever you insert the list name in your e-mail software). Some e-mail products use a special alias address for the originator of a list message, while others put your own e-mail address there. And we are all too familiar with spam that contains an invalid originating address.

Now, you may not really care about this for your own newsletter to the marketing department. It really doesn’t matter whether the message comes from you or from an alias address, and you don’t really care whether everyone’s e-mail address in the marketing department is listed in the header. But for wider and more professional efforts, you might.

Understanding this process is important because you may not want to have all your recipients see everyone else’s e-mail address. Scrolling through a long list of several thousand names isn’t a very nice way to start off reading any message, and it is easier for a recipient to just delete it unread than try to find the actual beginning of message after the roll call of all the names. And you may not wish to let everyone know who is getting a particular message. We still receive various e-mail from different public relations executives. What they have in common is that all of the person’s key press contacts were enumerated on the message header, with both the actual name and the e-mail address. Anyone could have copied these addresses down and used them to start a good mailing list to these contacts. Again, this gets back to our notion of the publishing process, and drawing parallels with the print world. What if a magazine was to fill its first several pages with a detailed list of its subscribers? You probably would be initially fascinated, but after the second or third time you’d skip ahead to the main content of the magazine, or maybe even cancel your subscription.