Journal entry for October 18, 2001

Today's summary: Updating my mailing list.

It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

I've been collecting names and emails on both of my websites for a couple of years now... I've never actually sent out a monthly "Artist's update newsletter" type thing, although I plan to start doing so. Since a lot of the emails were from my digital art site, I wanted to make sure all these folks were still interested. So, I sent out email to all the names on my list, explaining who I am and why I'm writing... "You may not remember me, but..." etc. Asked them to write back if they wanted to stay on the list; if they didn't write back, they'd be automatically deleted.

The upshot is that now I'll have a totally opt-in mailing list, people who actually DO still remember that they signed up, people who won't get annoyed when I finally do start sending them regular emails.

In the future when new people sign up, I'll email them back to verify that they really did sign themselves up. Besides, who knows, we might get to chatting about art. Already I'm in several email conversations with folks I emailed this time around. It's great!