Thoughts on Email List Management

Newsletter subscriptions lists can be any size, but there may be practical limits to email discussion lists. The classic rule of thumb is that about one out of six online bulletin board or email list denizens posts regularly, while the rest "lurk," which means they observe instead of participating. An email list with 60 subscribers can therefore be expected to have 10 members who post actively, and "actively" can range anywhere from once per week to several times per day depending on the list's topic and the amount of passion the members have for it. How argumentative they are can also be a factor, but let's assume they are generally civil people who don't get into long back-and-forth exchanges where they all call each other names a dozen times every day, but stay on topic and speak up only when they have something useful to say. But one daily post from each of 10 people is still 10 daily messages. To some Internet users, that is a negligible amount of email. To others it's a lot. In any case, it's a manageable number.

Now multiply list membership by 10, to 600. If the 6:1 lurker:poster ratio holds, and each active poster averages one message per day, suddenly your email list is up to 100 daily messages.

How many Internet users have the time or stamina to deal with that much email on a single topic? At 30 seconds per message, that's 50 minutes per day nearly an hour spent reading email generated by that email list alone, and an active Internet user is likely to receive plenty of other important email, plus his or her share of the growing amount of spam that flows through the world's email servers like cancer cells through a leukemia victim's arteries.

When an email list starts taking up too much of subscribers' time, some of those subscribers will leave. The problem is, the subscribers who leave may not be the ones doing most of the posting, and the ones who stay may not be the ones doing the highest quality postings. An unmoderated email list can self-destruct if this happens unless a "list manager" monitors it regularly, participates, and gently guides discussions. This brings up a time and/or money problem, because managing an active email list can easily take several hours every day.

Is this amount of work worth your while? It can be, if the list supports a specific piece of software or another product, and the list takes at least some load off of technical support personnel, but in that case you must deal with the potential problem of a few unhappy customers turning the list into nothing but a complaint venue, and ruining its original purpose. The only sure way to prevent this (and keep the list on topic and the number of messages on it manageable) is to restrict list membership to registered users of the product or another defined group, and to make sure each member reads and agrees to a set of rules before joining. Anyone who violates the rules and won't fall back in line after several gentle reminders from the list manager must be banned. Some may try to come back again under a different name or through a different email account. This is why limiting membership to registered product users or using some other identifier besides an email address to keep just anyone from subscribing can be a good idea.

Even some news media should consider restricted or "invitation only" email lists. Imagine, for example, a hypothetical publisher who specializes in news for the hydroelectric power industry. The readers whom this publisher serves are government and utility executives, large-scale construction contractors (dam builders), and heavy equipment manufacturers. This is a geographically dispersed industry, so an email list would be a great way for people in it to get to know one another and share their problems and concerns. The publisher would be doing his or her readers a great service by providing and managing such a list, and would probably find it a great source of story leads as well. But this list will not work unless it is strictly private, because if it isn't, members won't feel free to speak their minds. The hydroelectric industry is often controversial; it is often the recipient of large amount of government funding, and it is often embroiled in disputes with environmentalists and competing power producers. A hydroelectric power generation executive may not want to speak openly on an email list that may be monitored by coal company people or environmental activists or reporters. But even a closed email list should not be considered truly private, especially if messages posted to it are archived on a Web site, as seems to be the case with the vast majority of email lists.