Monthly Photography Newsletter from Photo.net

by Josh Root

Photo.net Monthly Newsletter

Starting in October 2007 Photo.net began delivering a monthly newsletter to its users. The purpose of the newsletter is to bring the best of photo.net to our users’ inbox. It will inform them of new site content, draw attention to some talented photo.net members, and highlight some of the more interesting tips, events, photos, and information posted to the site every month. With thousands of new forum and gallery posts every day, it would be impossible to keep track of everything on photo.net. So this is the photo.net team’s way of helping with that problem.

If you do not wish to receive the Photo.net newsletter, you can modify your newsletter subscription status from your “my workspace” area. Look for the “Newsletter Subscription” link in the “Account Options” section.

Previous Newsletters

• June 2009 Community
• May 2009 Editorial
• May 2009 Community
• April 2009 Editorial
• April 2009 Community
• March 2009 Editorial
• March 2009 Community
• February 2009 Editorial
• February 2009 Community
• January 2009 Editorial
• January 2009 Community
• December 2008 Editorial
• December 2008 Community
• November 2008 Editorial
• November 2008 Community
• October 2008 Editorial
• October 2008 Community
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007

Things that might be confusing

Photo.net uses a company called Silverpop to mail out the newsletter. Due to the sheer size of the photo.net mailing list we have to be very careful about the way we send out mail. If we weren’t, all mail coming from the photo.net servers would quickly get tagged as spam. This would be particularly bad because new user email, topic notifications, email requests, and password reminders would all be blocked as a result. This would, understandably, cause a huge logjam of problems. This is where Silverpop comes in. They are used to working with email and internet service providers to prevent legitimate email from being blocked. Silverpop does mailings for companies like Buy.com, Golfsmith, Mazda, and Jetblue. They are a well-respected business working with Fortune 500 companies, not merely a fly by night spam-marketer.

What does this mean for you, the user? It means that a few things in the newsletter are going to be more suspicious than you would probably want them to be:

Some users have received the newsletter and others have not.

This is not because of any sort of priority mailing list. It is simply because even with a company like Silverpop helping us, we cannot send to our full mailing list at once. This has to be done in stages over a few days. As people have varying email delivery speeds and a variety of different spam catching security systems, there is

bound to be a wide range of time in which users will receive the mailing. As we gradually delete the out-of-date email addresses and update the list to reflect those who have unsubscribed, the overall delivery time should become faster.

The newsletter is sent from a “no reply” email address.

This is a necessity due to the fact that without it our mail servers would crash as a result of all the bounced email from addresses that no longer exist. Within each newsletter we will list the contact email (contact@photo.net) for our Director of Community, Josh Root, so that he can help with any related issues that may occur.

The “from” address is different from the actual sender.

While the sender email is listed as “noreply@photo.net”, those who look into the email header information will notice that the actual sender is from a “mkt691.com” domain. Again, this is part of the system that email-marketing companies like Silverpop use to keep the photo.net domain from being accused of spam activities.

Newsletter links do not point to photo.net.

The links in the email (including the “opt-out” link) do not direct you to http://photo.net, rather they point to “http://links.mkt691.com”. This is another part of the service that Silverpop provides. These dedicated links allow them to tell us how many people are actually using the email and how many are choosing to unsubscribe. If we found out that 90% of our users did not want to see a photo.net email, we would know to not bother in the future. Conversely, if we found out that people particularly liked one aspect of the newsletter (the “Featured Member” for example) we would know to add similar content in the future.

Does this mean that photo.net is selling user names and email?

Absolutely not. Please read the Photo.net Privacy Policy and be assured that we will never sell or give away your personal data to other companies.

It was inevitable that the first editions of the newsletter would have a few bugs in them. This was our first try at something like this and good old Murphy’s Law states that you aren’t going to avoid every problem. Depending on what is on your list of “worlds most aggravating things” these problems may have raised your blood pressure by a few points, or just have been something to chuckle at. In any case, we are working to solve/improve these problems as quickly as we can.

Non-HTML email readers may see a blank email.

For the current issues of the newsletter, we do not have a text-only email. If you are using any of the common email programs or web-based email providers, you should be able to switch your view from “plain” to “html” and have it display correctly. If you are using a Unix or other pure-text email reader, we do not have a solution for you right now. But you can view the current and recent past newsletters by clicking on the links at the top of this page. Do keep in mind that the unsubscribe link will not work when viewing via that method.

To unsubscribe, you must click on an “http://links.mkt691.com” link.

Photo.net members can now modify their newsletter subscription status from their “my workspace” area. Look for the “Newsletter Subscription” link in the “Account Options” section.

Users receiving multiple newsletter emails.

Due to the fact that photo.net has been around for over a decade, many of our long time users have ended up with more than one account during their time on photo.net. Since each individual account has to have an original email address, users may end up seeing more than one copy of the newsletter. Especially if they have set up their old email addresses to forward to their new address.