Question New maillist need old opt-outs.

[Midgard]

I have one large maillist comprised of all members in goodstanding usergroups, minus those who have unsubscribed or or been unsubscribed because of bounced mail. There are 150k subscribers and 65k unscubscribed.

I now need to create a new maillist, after moving old, inactive members into a separate usergroup, which will not be included in the new list. But I don't want anyone who has unsubscribed to the old list to start getting mail again.

In my situation, I think the best solution might be to run something in mysql which will turn off "Receive admin email" for every member who has unsubscribed to the maillist. But I'd like to know if there's a simpler solution I may have missed.

Members go back fourteen years, and I've been mailing to the list about twice a year. This last time, though, I had started paying attention to mailserver reputation, which plummeted.

The biggest problem, which I hadn't expected, was hitting spam traps. All the addresses had originally been verified by vB, but many spam traps apparently use old "recycled" addresses. Our board is fourteen years old, so I now can't afford to mail to the entire list, even with the bouncing emails having been cleaned up.

 

[Fillip H.]

What we could also do is run a MySQL query to set all the inactive users as unsubscribed to your existing mailing list. That would allow you to preserve your mail statistics for your existing mailing list, which may be preferable to simply creating a new list.

If you'd rather start fresh with a new list, I can help you with a query that will copy subscribed users from the old list, minus the users in the Inactive usergroup.

Let me know what you prefer, and I'll let you know which details I need in order to sort out that query

 

[Midgard]

Having thought about this a day, I still think turning off admin email for everybody who has unsubscribed might be best for my situation. It would provide more more flexibility for future mailings, in adjusting who is subscribed by default. I want to go back as far as possible with "last activity" date, as I've always gotten good response from some really old members. But I don't want spam traps and complaints.

And I think anyone who unsubscribes from a maillist because of an occasional mailing, probably doesn't want to get any mail from us. The only downside I see is that this would complicate anyone's resubscribing.

Now that I've been paying attention to mail that's still bouncing, I noticed some vB notifications, like "PM box full." are still going out, even though the account is flagged "bounce" and admin email turned off. I had nine bounces from one such account yesterday afternoon, an active member who gets a lot of PMs. Not sure if that's just a vB 3.8 issue.

I had edited the "bounced mail" PM to tell members they didn't need to do anything if they didn't care about receiving mail.

 

[Fillip H.]

Having thought about this a day, I still think turning off admin email for everybody who has unsubscribed might be best for my situation.

So, to recap, you want to turn off Admin Email for all inactive users & all users who have unsubscribed? That would still save you having to create a new mailing list.

Now that I've been paying attention to mail that's still bouncing, I noticed some vB notifications, like "PM box full." are still going out, even though the account is flagged "bounce" and admin email turned off. I had nine bounces from one such account yesterday afternoon, an active member who gets a lot of PMs. Not sure if that's just a vB 3.8 issue.

It's not really possible for vBMail to fully block all emails, we can only turn off certain email settings such as thread subscriptions, etc.

 

[Midgard]

So, to recap, you want to turn off Admin Email for all inactive users & all users who have unsubscribed? That would still save you having to create a new mailing list.

Just those who have unsubscribed. I might want to divide up the inactive group in the future and add the more recent members back into default subscribers.

 

[Fillip H.]

Those users won't automatically be re-subscribed, though. You wouldn't be able to blanket turn admin emails back on for those users, as you wouldn't have any way of knowing who legitimately no longer wanted to receive those emails - to do so would be violating every spam policy on the internet.

 

[Midgard]

Not sure I follow you. But I want to use whatever method works and is the easiest to implement.

Initially, I want a maillist consisting of only "active" usergroups, meaning all members who've logged in within the past two years, but excluding those who have unsubscribed from the current, all-member list.

Complicating this, I also want to experiment by expanding the list in future mailings, going back further than two years, again excluding anyone who has previously opted out. I would presumably do this by splitting the inactive group and adding the more recent members to the main list, or a separate list. I want to adjust this with each mailing, watching for any spam traps or excessive complaints. However, even mailing to the entire member list, complaints have been below .01%, with .04% considered acceptable for email marketers. So that's less of an issue than spam traps.

I don't care if an old member who has opted out of the list can't easily resubscribe. There'd only be a few, and they can contact an administrator, or just re-register.

Bounced mail is also a factor. Sendersore.org now says excessive bounces are the only major issue lowering our server's "score.", but I think bounces are now minimized. I had set the bounce threshold to 1 in our last mailing. Those "PM box full notifications," which blast through everything, are still annoying.

With anti-spam measures making email delivery so problematic nowadays, I can't imagine running a large board without vBMail. It should come with the vB package.

 

[Fillip H.]

Well, I'm currently working on vBMail v2 which will contain a Maintenance page with a tool for unsubscribing all users from one or more usergroups from one or more mailing lists.

You could use that to unsubscribe old users

 

[Midgard]

You could use that to unsubscribe old users

I will look forward to version 2.

Not sure when you will have that ready to release, but I need to send another mailing this week, filtering out accounts in my inactive usergroup. Do you have a mysql query I can use now? My knowledge of mysql, like PHP, is monkey-see-monkey-do.

Also, I may have misunderstood or not made myself clear earlier. If an account has "Receive admin emails" turned off, vBMail maillists do not mail to that address, even if subscribed. At least that's what I gather from watching the mailing. So those who have that turned off would never get any more maillist mail, even if their usergroup was re-subscribed by default for a future mailing. In my case, that would make experimenting with different usergroups with older members easier, rather than just one-way.

But I can work with "one-way" for now, meaning never being able to automatically re-subscribe anybody who was unsubscribed because they are are in inactive usergroup. Hope I'm being clear and understanding all this correctly.

 

[Fillip H.]

v2 Beta 1 with the aforementioned mailing list tool will be released in approx. 6 hours from now

 

[Midgard]

v2 Beta 1 with the aforementioned mailing list tool will be released in approx. 6 hours from now

Downloaded and upgraded last night. Thanks again.

Before I commit to unsubscribing inactive members, I must decide how far back I want to go as far as an account's "last activity." With the current software, that will be irreversible, as I can't send any future mailings to unsubscribed members without sending to those who unsubscribed themselves.

So, as this version now keeps a log of unsubscriptions, do you have any plans to enable resubscribing. perhaps based on another usergroup, but excluding those who unsubscribed themselves.

A lot of our old members still come back, but don't bother to login, which could also mean resetting their password. And I get a lot of replies to our "noreply" address from the vB birthday greetings, which were being sent to every registered member, going back fourteen years, before I moved all the old accounts to "inactive." Almost all, including the really old ones, thanked us for remembering. So I'm inspired to also continue mailing our occasional newsletter to as many of our old accounts as possible, without hitting those damned spam traps. Finding out how far I can go back requires experimentation.

 

[Fillip H.]

Resubscribing kinda exists, by going to the Manage Subscribed Users page in the Mailing List Manager. It's very cumbersome by forcing you to do it individually, though.

I'll have a think about it