[Businessmtg] server purge update

[Lynne]


Hello again.

 

This has been quite an interesting process. One that I am glad I will not be doing again during my term. :) For background, periodically - every 3-4 ish years - we clean up the subscription list on the server. This clears out email addresses that receive emails, but don't actively engage at ASP. And by active engagement, I mean reading shares. All that is required to stay subscribed is to reply to one of many emails sent out by the list administrator. I started this process near the middle of February and sent out 4 emails to the recovery meeting over 5 weeks asking people to reply to me.

 

On the day I sent the first email, I downloaded a list of all email addresses subscribed at ASP and put them in an excel spreadsheet. Then as I received replies, I put a date next to the corresponding email address in my excel file. On Wednesday, Mar 27th,  I copied all email addresses that were not marked as replying and unsubscribed them. Note that any new members added to ASP from the date I sent the first email were not affected by this purge as their email addresses were not in my excel spreadsheet.

 

So on Wednesday I unsubscribed 668 people to leave 182 people subscribed to ASP. I then re-subscribed 56 people between Wednesday and Sunday. And two new members joined, which is how we arrived at 240 members as of March 31, 2024.

 

The server has options when unsubscribing people and one of them is whether or not to send an email telling them that they have been unsubscribed. I clicked yes to that option, so all 668 people that I unsubscribed got a email notification. A decision I semi-regret. :)  Because very quickly, I was inundated with people asking to be added back. Out of the 56 people I re-subscribed, about 15-20 were my mistakes from either 1) human error in not marking the excel spreadsheet when I received their email, 2) a computer crash that happened when my excel file was open - I thought I had recovered all the email addresses that I lost in the crash, but I hadn't and 3) my spam filter on my email. The other 35-40 people I re-subscribed didn't reply to any of my 4 emails that I had sent out...

 

I expect that I will get a few more people here and there asking to be re-subscribed over the next few weeks to months, but I think that the vast majority of the people who were unsubscribed and want back on the list have already contacted me.

 

So now we are at a point where we have an accurate count of our members. Phew!

 

Hugs,

Lynne