It was obvious from some of the feedback that I received on my post yesterday about my problems with ASAE’s listserv that I am not the only person who has had the experience of getting spammed by the application and I am also not the first to bring this up in a blog post. While I may not be the first, I certainly hope I can be the last by continuing to drive this issue until some sort of workable solution is found. Granted some things can’t be changed and those that do get changed often do so only because of patience and persistence. Fortunately I have a lot of both. I also have a good amount of resourcefulness and willingness to seek out potential answers to the problem and share them in the hopes of being part of the solution instead of just part of the problem.

Both Fred Simmons and Elizabeth Weaver Engel got me thinking about what could be done to remedy the situation and I have to agree that other organizations are using Lyris ListServ without generating an undue amount of redundant or unnecessary email to the list members, the question is how. I did a good deal of self-educating since I posted yesterday and I think the answer is actually pretty simple and fortunately does not put the burden of responsibility on individual ASAE members. In fact a pretty simple Google search yielded a number of solutions in the first page of results.

For example Dgroups, an online home for groups and communities interested in international development, has a wiki dedicated to the Lyris ListServ product which they use for their own groups and had a great entry on preventing “out of office” messages from being sent to list members. I have included it below:

How do I prevent “out of office” messages from arriving to the list?

A filter on the global server level is applied to all messages of all lists containing typical “out of office” message keywords. This filter prevents these messages from being sent to Dgroups lists. The keywords in the global filter are the following:

• AutoReply
• Autoreply
• autoreply

If you have any suggestions to add to this list, please send them to zqu AT bellanet.org.

If you would like to create a filter which will apply to only your list, then follow the steps below. Note that by creating a new filter, it will be applied in addition to the filter on the global server level. Before creating your own filter, it is important to be cautious when choosing words/phrases which will prevent a message from being delivered to a list, in order to reduce the possibility of legitimate messages not arriving to the list.

Follow these steps to create your own filter:
1. Login to the Lyris interface.
2. Click on ‘List Admin’.
3. Click on ‘Action Phrases’.
4. Click on ‘Create Phrase’.
5. Supply the information:

• Phrase: These are the word(s)/phrase(s) which will prevent the message containing them to be sent to your list. For this field, follow the directions given. Note that there should only be one word/phrase per line. No additional syntax should be included for phrases, such as surrounding the phrase by quotations.
• Response: nothing.
• Rule: phrase appears in the message body or subject (normally, this is the best choice)

You do not need to change any other values, but if you would like to be notified of when the filter is triggered, then supply your email address in the Notify field.

6. Click ‘Save’.

Source: Dgroups - Administrator FAQ

To be honest, that is about as easy as it gets. I would estimate creating these rules would take someone at ASAE under a half hour of effort to implement and based on the OOO responses that I received would have eliminated 30 of 31 (96.77%) of messages that I received. That’s a pretty significant reduction in unnecessary responses and likely a pretty significant reduction in the amount of emails that server that Lyris is installed on would have to process. Everybody wins.

Similarly, ASAE goes out of their way to help educate users in how to respond to both the list and individual users, but again they place the onus on the user instead of configuring the system to work with them. For example the ASAE Listserv instructions specifically tell users that if they want to reply directly to another user they should:

• Avoid resending the entire message to which you are replying by cutting and pasting the relevant parts into your response. And, please do not resend a digest back to the e-mail list.
• Using the reply button in your e-mail application will automatically send your response to the entire list. To reply directly to a member of the list, forward the e-mail and copy and paste his or her e-mail address into the “To” line.

Source: ASAE and the Center

This too is something they could configure Lyris to handle for maximum member benefit. Again borrowing from the Dgroups:

Can I change my list settings so that when participants “Reply” to a message, the reply only goes to the sender of the message and not the list?

Yes, by default message replies go to the list address. To change this to the sender of the message:

1. Login to the Lyris interface.
2. Click on ‘List Admin’.
3. Click on ‘List Info’.
4. In the section ‘Email Headers’, change the value in the ‘Reply To’ field to ‘author’ (by default, it is blank).
5. Click ‘Save Mailing List’.

Source: Dgroups - Administrator FAQ

Again, another really simple fix that could have a major impact. The question that I have is whether this is something that resulted as a lack of knowledge and/or attention or a lack of willingness to make the change. I have to assume it is the former as opposed to the later as ASAE does appear (at least to me) to be highly tuned into it’s members needs and responds when and where it can.

Admittedly I am a bit concerned about the feasibility of this solution to work for ASAE only because they are running a version of Lyris that appears to be a number of versions behind the current. Based on an evaluation of the html generated page they are running:

Lyris ListManager WIN32 database MSSQL version 7.0 build 1442 - Mar 17 2003

A quick view of the Lyris Listserv page indicates that they are currently up to Version 10.0. That places ASAE 14 releases out of the most modern release.

And because my familiarity with Lyris is rather limited I can’t say for certain whether this will work or not. And while I am not advocating for implementing a new version of a platform or system simply because it is available, often times new versions are release because they address shortcomings of past versions and also introduce valuable new features and functionality. Based on what I was able to ascertain this is exactly the case.

I will say that it is a great case study in the importance of making sure that your core technology is in order before running down the rabbit hole of new technology adoption. All of the cool new technology adoption in the world is of little value to your members if your core technology doesn’t work the way it should or in a way that inconveniences them.

So ASAE what can you do to fix this. If you aren’t going to listen to your most enthusiastic supporters who are you going listen to? Is there something obvious that I am overlooking? Is there a business reason that you can’t make these changes? I (and apparently many others) are interested in knowing. And for you technology pro’s out there what else can could ASAE do to fix this? There has to be blenty of other ways to make the listserv more useful and user friendly thereby making it stickier and less of an inconvenience for members who really want to get involved but couldn’t be bothered with the some of the problems that I have had.

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