Best way to notify friends of a new e-mail address

[wordmunger]

Hi--

I just received a very common sort of e-mail: a friend letting me know her email address had changed. However, my junk mail filter marked it as junk (not Mail's filter: a third-party product, which I've now deleted), I suppose because the sender was not in my address book. You see, she sent the e-mail from her NEW address.

This is what I've always done in the past, because then if people reply to that e-mail, it goes to the right address. But now I realize it could cause problems when people are running overagressive spam filters. So now it seems to me that the best way to notify people might be to send it from your OLD address. I'm just wondering what the experiences of others have been when notifying people about their new address.

What's the best way to do it?

 

[Sun Baked]

You can ship us all iPods with the new e-Mail address engraved on the back, that sure would make us notice the new address.

 

[winwintoo]

This is an interesting question and one that hasn't been well thought out in the whole spam busting debate.

I would have done the same as you, sent the information from the new address so that people could reply to the new address, but you're right, most spam filters would stop it.

My ISP offers a spam filter that I used for about a week and I was down from about 300 emails a day to about 20 that got through to me - 10 of them were spam and in the purgatory file that the ISP allowed me to view there were perhaps another 20 emails - 10 of which should have been allowed through for sure and the others were not that objectionable. I have no idea what happened to the rest of the 300 emails. Since I usually read about half of the 300 emails, I assume that a lot of my regular correspondence was being chucked for some reason that I had no control over.

To further aggravate me, AOL has decided that my ISP is evil and won't allow emails from my ISP to be delivered to AOL addresses which means that about one in 10 emails to my sister with an AOL address actually reaches her. I have a solution to that problem now that we've figured out why our mail was bouncing, but it took some digging to get to the bottom of it

Was it in your blog WM that I read about a plan where email would be kept on the senders machine until the recipient came and got it? Seems like such a simple concept - why not do it??

But I digress, Back to our original programming, Margaret

 

[sarae]

might not be feasible, but if you have any advance warning of a new email address, you could send out an email from your old, notifying everyone of the new. that way they'd have a chance to enter it into their address books.

 

[wordmunger]

might not be feasible, but if you have any advance warning of a new email address, you could send out an email from your old, notifying everyone of the new. that way they'd have a chance to enter it into their address books.

Yeah, that seems like the best bet. Maybe then following up with an e-mail from the new address, once it's become the "permanent" address. I guess the issue becomes, some of my acquaintances/former business associates who I'm rarely in touch with might see two e-mail address warnings as a little excessive.

Winwintoo, it wasn't my blog where you saw that idea. I kind of like the idea that someone had a while back where everyone sets a price by which they will accept an email, something like 25 cents. The idea is, if your friend sends you an email, you waive the fee, but if a spammer sends it, you don't. Spammers are soon put out of business -- they wouldn't be willing to pay what it costs to send out all those e-mails.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Why not send it from both the new one & old one?
That should get to most people...

That's what I did when I did a bulk email: no probs.

The email did say something like: sorry if you've already got this but some people have had their mail blocked etc etc.

I then politely asked people to send a couple of words of confirmation.

One week later, I shut the old email address down...

 

[pooky]

Or just send it from the old one, but with the new one in the "reply to:" field. Most mailers will notice that, and reply to the correct address.

 

[Colonel Panik]

Was it in your blog WM that I read about a plan where email would be kept on the senders machine until the recipient came and got it? Seems like such a simple concept - why not do it??

Because you would a) have to be notified that there's an email for you, and that would be open to abuse, and b) everyone would need to leave their machines on the whole time.
Nice idea though.

Whoever figures out a new system whereby spam doesn't get through should be awarded the Nobel Prize.