Alan Gutierrez

I’ve resumed the Think New Orleans mailing list. I’ve sent two missives already.

I’ve postponed the mailing list for a while. It has always been very successful. People know me more through the mailing list than through the weblog or the Wiki.

My first mailing was last week. At the Bayou Boogaloo, people said, hey, I got your message. There were people who wrote me back, to tell me that they would have missed the Bayou Boogaloo if not for the missive.

Mass email is distasteful to a web developer like myself. It seems cheap.

In New Orleans however, the protocol that reigns supreme is not HTTP, but SMTP. People don’t want to Google. They already have so much information it hurts. They are not about to go searching for more. An inbox is an evil. It is however, quantifiable. There is a count. Moreover, it is evil that has your name on it. It has that much context. There is still no place that provides significant context for information about New Orleans or the recovery.

In order to resume the email list I created an Java project and called it emailer. It was dull programming. Simply, reading the Java Mail API references that I’d collected, and applying them. I have an objective to grow the list, and grow it quickly, advertising it’s circulation growth in each missive.

The first step was to develop a simple opt out form. Then I sent out a multipart alternative message, built from the plain text and HTML exports of a Writeboard. I set up a bounces address and generate a VERP address and send it according to the article Using Apache James and JavaMail to implement Variable Envelope Return Paths.

After the Bayou Boogaloo, and the kind words about the missive, a name for the project occurred to me, whilst walking across Washington toward Mid-City.

• Missive - a written communication.

I’m enjoying this project, now. Looking forward to what it can accomplish.

Yesterday, I sent out another missive using the same revision. The same except that I changed the project name.

This evening I added embedded images, where before I was linking to images on Flickr, so my next missive will be more readily compatible with GMail and others.