Consider this part two in the Adventures in Newslettering arc. I mentioned to some people who either phoned or emailed me about what happened that I was going to write a "Joseph Carrabis, Email Anti-Christ" post and here it is. First off, the response to the invitation to The NextStage Irregular was amazing. Especially to me. I got a 29% buy-in. I was sure I wouldn't hit 10%. I was positive I'd be lucky to get 3%. But 29%?
Talk about putting the pressure on. Now I'll have to write something.
So first, thanks to everyone who accepted the invitation. Special thanks to those people who sent the invitation on and caused others to sign up.
I truly am shocked by the response.
So why "Joseph Carrabis, Email Anti-Christ"? Read on...
I wrote in Adventures in Newslettering that someone "exposed" the BCC field when they received the invitation email and that's when the fun began. I write "exposed" because I can't think of another term for it. I didn't know you could expose a BCC field and that's because I'm a Luddite.Note to readers; never confuse intelligence with a lack of luddism. I have a great deal of luddism and not much intelligence so I know from what I write.
I was working on the assumption that the receiver of a BCC fielded message couldn't see what was in the BCC field. Turns out I was mistaken. Turns out I could view that kind of information by selecting "Headers View All" in my email client settings.
Anyway, we were able to trace the email influenza back to a single response. I queried the originator of that response and got the following:
The reason I, and probably all the other idiots, hit reply-all (deliberately - no confusion), is because fhein-mhor@nextstagevolution.com showed up as a recipient (see below - which does seems odd if he was in the BCC field), and therefore potentially the guy managing the optin list (as it didn't seem likely you were doing it). Seeing your name in the "From" field meant I had stopped paying attn to the actual email address following it:
Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:38:27 -0500
From: Joseph Carrabis <lists@nextstagevolution.com>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031)
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Invitation to NextStage Newsletter
X-Envelope-From: lists@nextstagevolution.com
X-Envelope-To: fhein-mhor@nextstagevolution.com
People who don't know me well might be surprised to learn that I'm both fascinated and excited by that response. Heck, people who know me well might be surprised, as well. (Be advised: Teacher-Joseph is emerging...) Do you realize how much information -- psychological information, the heck with computer information -- is in the above?
And as I wrote the author of the above, neither I nor NextStage are blaming anybody for what happened. We recognize responsibility, not blame. The two are extremely different. Responsibility has an educational value assigned to it. Blame has a moral basis and neither I nor NextStage are qualified or able to make moral judgements.
(more to follow...)
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