E-mail can be an extraordinarily useful tool. It allows you to reach customers, suppliers and vendors cheaply and effectively.
Your list of contacts can be as valuable as any proprietary database you own. But use it inappropriately, even unintentionally, and it can be a PR nightmare.
The Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce — a committee created by Congress to make recommendations on the future of Internet business —offered regular e-mail updates for anyone willing to share his or her e-mail address. True to its word, every few weeks, an e-mail appeared, giving the time for the next meeting or suggesting interested parties visit the Web site for the committee’s latest action.
The problem came shortly after the committee finished its work: A strange e-mail appeared in the mailboxes of thousands of people on the committee’s e-mail list.
A Spanish college student requested information on e-commerce so she could complete work on her graduate studies. Unknowingly, she had sent the request to everyone on the committee’s list. Several people replied to that e-mail and their responses were transmitted to everyone on the list. Several people, now getting annoyed with these e-mails, began replying asking to be removed from the list.
Their requests were sent to everybody on the list as well.
By asking to be taken off the list, people were actually making the problem worse. As Andrew Gifford, an EDI program analyst for Dixson’s Stores Group and victim put it: A “dog chasing its tail.”
Here’s how it happened:
“We have been scrupulous, in the 10-month life of the commission, in sending mail to this list only to notify you of new material added to the site, since that’s what you asked to receive,” wrote Debbie Neville in her explanatory e-mail. “When we send mail, we send blind copies to everyone so that it is not possible for anyone to (purposely or inadvertently) reply to or message everyone on the list of some 1,500 addressees.
“In response to a request, we permitted one of our commissioners to send information to the entire list. We should have sent the information ourselves to ensure it was dispatched in our customary, secure administrative mode, but we provided the list to the commissioner’s office, which sent the mail without the ‘blind copy protection.’ It then became possible for anyone to ‘reply to all’ or otherwise send to the entire list.”
The result was that everybody on the list had the list.
Gifford was the first to respond to the situation, sending out an e-mail explaining how to put an end to the unwanted mass e-mailings. The solution, he says, was to stop sending e-mail asking to be removed from the list and to delete any new e-mail without responding to it “until this issue dies a natural death.”
The moral of this modern fable: Even the most well-laid plans in business can go easily astray with one small slip.
Daniel G. Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor of SBN.