Sunday, October 30, 2005 - Sun, 30 Oct 2005

I wanted to get Behold News out to everyone to ensure they knew about the new version, and about the fix for the Access Violations.

But now that my mailing list has been growing, I had a few customizations to do to my mailing list program first. Last mailing, I got a few bounce backs of bad addresses. I needed a way to mark these so that I don’t remail to them. Also, I have some people on two lists: my purchase list and my download list. I don’t want to send two e-mails to everyone and it is very labour-intensive to go through and remove them one by one. So I needed a way to mark duplicate e-mail addresses in my lists.

This took a lot of work all day long, but I managed to scrape through. It involved writing modules in Visual Basic / ASP script based on the horrid code that my mailing list system has. I’ve complained many times about Spd E-Letter before (see my April 20 and April 18 posts as well as my Feb 21 post in my previous blog). But, the one thing it does well is do the mailing, so I’ll just have to continue customizing it as it needs it.

Well I was able to pre-test everything except the sending of the messages. At 2 a.m., I finally broadcast the messages out. To my horror, the duplicates that I marked were NOT suppressed. Most purchasers will be getting two versions of the e-mail. And even worse: one person who asked to be removed from the list will be getting a mailing. Nothing I can do now, except apologise and make sure this doesn’t happen again.