Meryl's Notes Blog

One of my favorite e-newsletters is Janet Roberts’ Ezine-Tips. I don’t know how she does it. Doing an issue five days a week while discussing a variety of topics on the subject of managing an ezine.

I started sending out occasional emails to a mailing list providing them with information on new articles in meryl.net/articles. Alas, I haven’t put as many articles in there as I have in the past due to book and other projects.

If I did a regular ezine, it’d be done in a similar fashion to Janet’s. Keeping articles short, taking advantage of hard returns, punctuation, lines, anything that would make it easy to scan, use meaningful subject headings with the ezine’s name — which is short for the sake of using creative subject headers, put the URL at the top for those who want to see the HTML version (I don’t have the luxury to offer both HTML and text versions), include instructions on how to unsubscribe (sniff, sniff) and other useful information.

Sometimes, her ezine is very short, and it’s a good thing. She’s kind enough to send us something each day during the work week. We might get tired or fall behind in our ezine reading. Since hers vary in size and are scannable, it takes no time to read each one.

That’s probably my problem. I’d like to offer information on too many topics instead of just one. Anyway, beside the point.

I liked Janet’s issues on spam filters filtering out perfectly acceptable words found in legitmate ezines. One of the key items I like in an ezine is instructions on how to unsubscribe. Guess what spam filters are filtering. Yeah, “to unsubscribe.”

I immediately shot an email to her after receiving the article and wrote, “SpamKiller filters emails with “be removed.” Oh boy. It’s like The Borg. Spammers keep adapting to whatever technology we use to fight them.”

With Yahoo changing certain words and filters doing what they’re doing, I wonder if any legitimate ezine will make it to our emailboxes or if we’ll have to start learning SMS sp3ak to read ez1nes using l3tt3rs and #s to duck sp@m f1lters?

Hmm… maybe it’s just as well that I’m not writing an ezine and instead doing a something on paper that doesn’t go through filters unless you count editors.