[LAC-Discuss] ICANN News Alert emails

[Nick Ashton-Hart]

Dear All:

My apologies for the number of emails received today from the ICANN News Alert system. My intention was to automate a task which is currently manual - we have been forwarding these emails to the lists ourselves manually for months now, and my hope was that connecting the news alerts to the regional and global At-Large list would simply make this automatic.

Unfortunately there were some problems as you'll have seen - the below message from Kieren relates to the problems.

Again, our apologies.

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To ALAC mailing list subscribers,

Sorry for the number of emails you received yesterday on the mailing list subscribing the list to the ICANN News Alerts service. This is my fault.

ICANN's News Alert sends out an email each time an announcement of significance is added to the ICANN site. It's the same system we have been using for two years or more. In order to save staff and the community time manually resending email announcements whenever ICANN announces something, the ALAC lists themselves were subscribed to News Alerts.

However, despite the lists being added manually to the system, it still sent a double opt-in confirmation message. The result was that a large number of people were all sent a confirmation email. Then when a number of people clicked on the subscribe option in a short period of time, this led to a number of welcome emails.

In an effort to fix this now as fast as possible, the mailing list addresses were deleted; the welcome and confirmation options taken off, and the list resubscribed.

But, because of US anti-spam law, while the options were taken off, the system being used still insisted on sending the double opt-in email. And then, just for good measure, resending the welcome email all over again.

I realise that none of this is very helpful to anyone, so my apologies. The idea is still that since ICANN sends out a News Alert each time there is an interesting announcement, it is faster and more efficient for it to be sent directly to mailing lists, rather than have people notice the alert and manually resend it.

With this hump over with, it will be possible for that to happen automatically from now on.

Kieren McCarthy

General manager of public participation, ICANN

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Regards,

Nick Ashton-Hart
Director for At-Large
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
Main Tel: +33 (450) 40 46 88
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