| February 1999 Archived at Pineapplesoft |  | |||
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The Pineapplesoft Link newsletter covered a wide range of technical topics, see the archived issues. The newsletter was first emailed in 1998. In 2001 Benoît discontinued it in favour of professional writing for magazines. The “February 1999” page was archived in 2003 to preserve the original content of February 1999. | ||||
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Welcome to the 14th issue of Pineapplesoft Link. As always, you are welcome to send me your comments, questions or suggestions on the newsletter to [address removed, the newsletter is no longer published thank you for your support]. This issue revisits email. I will discuss how to complement a company web presence with email services. Pineapplesoft Link is sent only to those who subscribe to it. Some users could not remember signing and thought we were spamming them. If you do not remember signing up, let me try to help. You probably signed up at www.psol.be or by writing to [address removed]. To change your subscription information, please follow the simple instructions at the end of this issue. If you are not a subscriber and you
would like to receive Pineapplesoft Link free in your
mailbox every month, subscribe now! Pineapplesoft Link, February 99: Table of Contents
In Europe, books are delivered in less than a week with up to 10% price reduction! Worldwide shipping available. In association with Amazon.co.uk. The Elements of E-Mail Style by David Angell et al.
(Addison-Wesley) Stopping Spam by Alan Schwartz et al. (O'Reilly) Java Network Programming by Elliotte Rusty Harold
(O'Reilly) I saw "You've Got Mail," the movie <http://www.youvegotmail.com>, last month. When Internet movies are no longer science-fiction but romance stories, it shows that the Internet is finally reaching consumer status. I remember that only five years ago, I wanted my email address printed on my business cards and the shop had never seen the "@" character. We have come a long way. Still the movie got me thinking about email and, in particular, how everybody loves to receive email. Email is the single most popular Internet application. Yet many companies establish their Internet presence based on the web only. In this article, I will discuss some of the great services one can build on email. Email Popularity Studies constantly rank email as the most popular Internet application, beating the web. Indeed, like the characters in the movie, most of us love to receive mail. I think email is popular because it is a communication medium, and we, human beings, love to communicate. More specifically email is a very personal communication medium. Web sites are open to everybody to visit whereas a mailbox is a very personal thing. Email is therefore an ideal foundation on which to build exciting services. Marketing raves about targeted, personalized communication. Management wants focused, pertinent information. Email can deliver all this in a fun, engaging way. The operative words are personalized and focused. Best of all, email services are relatively cheap to implement. Email, unlike the web, is asynchronous and therefore scales very well. An email service can run on an under powered server (even a 486) and does not require the same fat pipes as a web site. Mailing Lists Let's first discuss the original email service, the mailing list. Mailing lists are those servers that send any mail they receive to all their subscribers. Mailing lists are primarily used for discussion forums and there are lists on almost any topic. Internally, mailing lists are often used to coordinate projects. Some organizations also run public lists where their customers can exchange tips and advice -- like a user club. Announcement lists or newsletters (such as this) are another popular application of mailing lists. Again corporations can use announcement lists to communicate with their customers or employees. There are many software packages <http://www.lsoft.com> and hosting services <http://www.listbox.com> for lists on the market. However one should not underestimate the investment in human resources: it takes time to write a newsletter and it takes even more time to moderate a mildly popular discussion forum. That's why many companies prefer to sponsor existing lists or newsletters. More Advanced Services Over the years, many other email services have been developed such as web-mail, email postcards, autoresponder, etc. Yet, the most interesting services, those where a company can really differentiate itself are alerts and reminder services. Netmind <http://www.netmind.com> was one of the pioneers in this category. Netmind controls web pages for more than 4 million subscribers. When a page is updated, it immediately notifies its subscribers. This is email service at its best: automatically delivering updates on information or tracking changes. If your company specializes in tracking information, be it traffic information, news, or the price of bananas, you should consider building an email service. Imagine if, before leaving the office, you could receive an email with traffic information, wouldn't that be helpful? Success Factors for Email Applications The key to success when developing email services is to offer personalized, focused services. As we saw, email is a very personal thing and it is important that the subscribers to your service feel confident and in control. The primary focus should be to give subscribers as much control as possible. More specifically they must control not only signon and signoff but also, if possible, the content that is delivered to them. For example, subscribers to the traffic information service should be able to specify when they want to receive the traffic report and for which area. Finally, it is important to fine-tune the frequency for delivery of information. Emails that are not read pile up in the mailbox. Most people do not check their mailbox more than once a day and they would prefer one email with all the changes of the day to several emails. It is not very difficult to build such a "digest" service and it should be standard for any service that generates more than one email a day. Subscribers Which leads to the issue of spam. There are many definitions of spam but most agree that irrelevant emails that are sent without the consent of the receiver is spam. Irrelevant of what spam is, there is one thing that is clear: you do not want people to think you are a spammer. Email from spammers is rejected by most system administrators. Likewise, an email service lives on its subscribers. If people start doubting its integrity, the service will not prosper. Therefore, my advice is to resist anything that looks even remotely like spam. When the service is new and subscribers are few, it is so tempting to force the hand of some people. My advice is don't! Remember the key to success is personalized and focused information. That simply does not marry well with forcing people. I also recommend that you do not buy address lists. Unfortunately, most companies selling address lists are not trustworthy. Remember that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Technicalities An email service typically runs on a simple server that has a good connection to an email server. It does not need lots of bandwidth as emails are typically light but it needs a fast email server such as L-SMTP <http://www.lsoft.com>. The server will also have a database, to store subscriber preferences and it may need a small web server where subscribers can modify their options. It is easy to write email-enabled applications in almost any language <http://www.developer.com/journal/techworkshop/112498_jmail.html>. The major problem is presenting information using simple text. It's a wild world out there. There are two dominant web browsers but there are literally hundreds of mailers. The lowest common denominator is pure 7 bits ASCII text (no accentuated letters) with lines of less than 73 characters. Yes, I know we are in 1999 but this bare bone option is the only thing that works from AOL to a remote ISP. You may also offer HTML as an alternative. Beware that, as of this writing, HTML mail is not common enough to replace pure ASCII. You really should support both or ASCII only. Luckily it's not difficult to automatically convert from HTML to ASCII. Another major problem is bounced mail. Some email addresses are incorrect because of typos or because the recipient has moved. Your server must handle bounced mail gracefully. If somebody remains unreachable for a more than a week, you probably want to unsubscribe them automatically. Conclusion It is not very difficult to create interesting email services and these may be as popular, if not more popular, then web equivalent. Internet-savvy organizations would do well to consider email services part of the Internet strategy. Don't miss the new articles:
If you would like to learn more about XML/EDI and the use of XML for electronic commerce, I suggest you participate in one of the seminars I will give for Edifrance in February or in May. These one-day seminars are arranged for Paris. For more information, contact <edifr@worldnet.net>. and we will forward you the brochure. Pineapplesoft Link is published freely, every month via email.
The focus is on Internet applications in its broadest sense:
distributed and mobile computing, e-commerce, Java, XML, etc. The
articles target people interested or concerned about technology
either personally or professionally. Editor: Benoit Marchal Acknowledgements: thanks to Sean McLoughlin MBA for helping me with this issue. Back issues are available at <http://www.psol.be/old/1/newsletter/>. Although the editor and the publisher have used reasonable endeavors to ensure accuracy of the contents, they assume no responsibility for any error or omission that may appear in the document. Pineapplesoft is a registered trademark of Pineapplesoft sprl in the Benelux. Last update: February 1999. |