Weighing in on the Case Daily
I've been following the recent discussion (1, 2, 3) regarding the new Case Daily email with much interest. Overall, I think the Case Daily is a good thing because it centralizes all-campus email, which will probably result in increased uniformity and decreased volume of campus-wide email announcements. The Case Daily isn't perfect, though. Read on for my chief complaints about the mail, and some suggestions for improvement.
Following the first installment, I sent a letter with some suggestions for improving the Case Daily to the feedback address. I was pleased to see some of them (providing an RSS feed, keeping archives on the Web, fixing the 'skip to section' links, providing a web form for submissions) implemented the next day. The use of the Case blog system facilitated several of these changes and was a great improvement.
The only suggestion I made in my original message that has not been carried out is the offering of a plain-text version of the mailing. I do not particularly care for HTML email and would much rather receive a plain ASCII version. I also know that I am not alone in this preference.
Since the switch to the Blog@Case-based system, I noticed a few more areas that could be improved. First, the RSS feed has one entry per day. Modifying the format so there is one RSS entry per news item would aid in quickly locating and reading items of interest.
Second, there is a statement on the Case Daily FAQ page that "there is a way for you to 'opt out' utilizing the filtering tools in your email account." That statement is incorrect. "Opting out" means doing something such that the email is never sent in the first place. Saying "there is a way for you to 'opt out' utilizing the filtering tools in your email account" is kind of like saying "you can opt out by poking out your eyes with a stick so you can't see the email." Of course it's possible, but it's not a desirable solution.
Since I usually get and read the Case Daily via RSS before receiving the email, I would like to opt out of the email (which is, for me, redundant). Ideally, this would be possible. I do recognize, though, that the University may have good reasons for not allowing people to opt out of the Case Daily. At the very least, change the FAQ's misleading statement to something like "It is not possible to opt out of receiving the Case Daily because <reason>. However it may be possible to configure your email client to filter out the messages." <reason> could be something like "we feel it is important that all Case people get these messages", "we didn't bother to implement the feature", or whatever. The FAQ would then be both more informative and technically correct.
Brian Gray said on January 16, 2006 04:39 PM:
I agree with you Andrew. I read the RSS version, but would prefer each news item be posted by itself. It would make it easier to read the relevant items, and save the items I want to refer to later.