Gregory Szorc's blog

My Proposed Solution to Mass E-mails

OK, there are two classes of mass e-mails that are sent to the campus:

1. Essential notifications dictating a change in policy
2. Non-essential announcements

Essential notifications should be sent to everyone because they dictate a change in policy. Although they can sometimes be annoying, they are not going away.

Non-essential e-mails are what I complain about (1, 2, 3). These e-mails should be filtered and people should have the option to unsubscribe to them. Moreover, it would very convenient to be able to get these notifications in RSS.

The current solution of sending these e-mails consists of the following:

1. User logs in to a site where they can compose the e-mail (only certain users allowed)
2. User clicks 'send' and e-mail is sent

My solution:

A "Campus Notifications" blog is created. Certain users have access to create entries in this blog. A certain subset of these users have publish permission on this blog. That is, many can write drafts, but only some can publish these articles. When an entry is published, the RSS feed for the blog is updated. Somewhere in la-la land there sits a script reading this feed. The script looks for new entries and sends these entries to a pre-populated case-campus list on lists.case.edu or similar service.

Since the e-mail goes through a listserver, people have the ability to unsubscribe. They also have the ability to receive e-mail in mass digests instead of 6 a day. Since entries are composed on the Blog system, you can subscribe to them via syndicated feeds. Also, by giving publish rights to a select few (say a few people in the Marketing Division), we create a filter on content to prevent what happened earlier today.

Mass e-mails are meant to keep people informed of important developments. Instead, people have grown accustomed to their irrelevant content and are ignoring them. Apathy is a big enough problem on this campus. We shouldn't be encouraging the behavior of ignoring official e-mails by passively supporting the current system. The system needs to change.

You can ping this entry by using http://blog.case.edu/gps10/mt-tb.cgi/4573 .

I think your concerns are common everywhere and represent the changes we will see over time in communication patterns in academia, corporate world, etc.

Can RSS feeds be protected by a password, so only Case people can subscribe and get updates? While not possible to control, it is assumed email messages are "for your eyes only." Of course that does not prevent people from forwarding it, but you will constantly see warnings to this in the corporate world (this message is for the receipiant only...). I can see situations were Case or other organizations would not want to broadcast these internal messages to anyone in the world that can subscribe to a RSS feed.

I assume Case faculty, staff, and students are required to use their Case email or have it forwared to another email. By these mass emails being sent to Case email addresses, the sender can assume that it was received by everyone and no one can complain that "they did not see the announcement." If you convert to RSS feeds only for organizational announcements, how do you guarantee receipt to members within the organization?

Maybe this is where the MyCase portal comes in. People are subscribed to required RSS feeds based on their department, class rank, employment status, etc. that display on their Case portal. There would be expectations that you monitor your MyCase, and if you don't it is your lose only, thus Case's departments would not have to deal with the "I did not know" reply often received if messages are not openly broadcasted.

While I agree that mass emails are not well regulated, members of an organization (whether academic or an employer) should not have expectations to avoid internal communication. But systems like you suggest should be established to regulate communication. That is what RSS feeds, listservs, internal department emails, etc. are designed for, but has the campus been doctinated to their use?

While I agree with your concerns about unregulated and overused mass emails, how many on campus would still prefer the mass emails? I think we have reach an exciting tipping point in the communication patterns we will see in the future. I was told various times while earning my Library & Information Science degree, that three (3) was the magic number when getting the best exposure for an announcement. Announcements had to be sent out in three ways, because not everyone learns or pays attention in the same manner. For example, an announcement could be sent out in print, email, and radio/tv. If we use RSS feed to replace email announcments, I think something like the Case Portal should be used as the RSS aggregator so an assumption of receipt can be assumed by the sender.

From a technical standpoint, it is possible to make RSS feeds so that they require a username and password to access. This is actually a very trivial thing to do.

Organizations have internal messages. You aren't going to get rid of that. There will still be a necessity for mass e-mails no matter how you cut the pie. I believe a baby step would be transitioning the non-essential announcements to using the Blog. The average user wouldn't know, but one who understands and uses RSS would jump on the opportunity to subscribe to the feed. A side-effect of this move is we could guage how much of the campus knows how to use RSS feeds.

Brian, your ideas for the portal are what a portal should be, not what the Case portal is, unfortunately. The Case Portal is currently just a gateway to access information you cannot access anywhere else. If it aggregated tons of information and filtered it down based upon my relationship with the data, I would actually use the thing.

My biggest problem with some information on campus is I don't have a way of pulling it. I cannot pull information off the portal via RSS. I cannot get e-mail updates of information from the portal (not that there is anything there worthy). Worse, I cannot get RSS or e-mail from Blackboard, which often has important academic announcements that, when missed, severely limit my ability to succeed in a class. I have relented to manually checking Blackboard on a daily basis.

I believe elsewhere you commented on the general awareness of syndicated feeds (RSS in particular). Would you care to help create a comprehensive tutorial on the Case Wiki? I'm thinking the title would be Using syndicated feeds.

Good idea on the wiki entry. Over the next month, I will be preparing my materials for my spring CaseLearns class on RSS feeds. I will be focusing on what are RSS feeds, some examples on how they can be used and accessed, and what Kelvin Smith Library web sites and databases offer RSS feeds. As I prepare my materials for my class, I will include the information in the Case Wiki.

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