Email

 

Perhaps the most common of all technologies employed by activists is email. In addition to normal person-to-person communications, there are a number of ways in which email can be particularly useful to activists:

 

• Newsletters: More and more organizations are moving away from traditional print newsletters in favor of electronic publications distributed via email. Modern email technology allows most, recipients to view HTML emails with text formatting, graphics, hyperlinks, and much more.

• Action Alerts: Many organizations send out “action alerts”: emails that encourage supporters to take a specific action, such as sending a fax or email, or making a phone call. Tools are available that enable recipients to send faxes or prewritten emails by simply clicking a link within the message.

• Event Promotion: Email is a great way for organizations to advertise their events. The ease of reaching a large audience and the ability to forward messages help such announcements spread rapidly.

• Auto-Responders: Most popular email clients, including many free web-based services, offer automatic response options. You can configure your organization’s email address to automatically reply to all incoming mail, letting the sender know that their message has been received even before it is read and replied to by a human being.

• Fundraising: Activist groups increasingly use email to solicit donations from supporters. A growing number of tools enable recipients to easily make donations by clicking a link within an email message. Many of these tools are integrated with additional software to track donations and manage your list of donors (see “Fundraising Applications” elsewhere in this module).

• Mailing Lists: Mailing lists can be used in any number of ways, and are described in detail in the "Mailing Lists (AKA Listservs)" section of this module.

 

Email Clients

Common email clients are discussed in the Contact Management section of this module under “Personal Information Managers”.

 

Web-Based Email

As web-based email interfaces have improved, individuals and organizations increasingly access their email through free web mail services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail. Beyond the attractive price-tag, the chief advantages of these services is that they provide very large inboxes compared to most non-web-based email providers. Certain services, such as RiseUp, offer added encryption and security features, but are unable to match the massive amount of storage space that corporations such as Yahoo can afford to offer.

 

Gmail (www.gmail.com)

Google’s Gmail service is known for its advanced interface and vast amount of on-server storage (7 GB and counting). Gmail also provides a free POP3 server, making it easy to use email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird to manage your Gmail account. However, Gmail poses major problems for users concerned about privacy and security. Google automatically searches all messages
(regardless of whether they are being sent to or from its users) for terms that could be used to deliver more precisely-focused advertising. Additionally, Google’s privacy policy includes a clause stipulating that “residual copies of e-mail may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account” and another stating that the company reserves the right to disclose the contents of messages to other parties if ithas “a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public”.
Google further stipulates in its Terms of Use that all account holders consent to the company being allowed to disclose information in response to a “governmental request”, regardless of the formality or legality of said request. When one also considers the fact that Google has the ability to cross-reference
users’ email information with records of their search and other activity, there’s good reason to be alarmed. Even when configured to prevent messages from being stored in one’s inbox, Gmail is not secure. For these reasons, it’s probably not a good idea for activists to use Gmail. For more information, see www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com.

 

Yahoo Mail (www.mail.yahoo.com)

Yahoo was the second major player to enter the free web mail market, a few months after Hotmail. Their free service currently offers 1 GB of storage and supports attachments as large as 10 MB. Yahoo typically offers free POP3 servers with addresses registered in non-US Yahoo domains, such as “de.yahoo.com”, but US account holders will need to use a special utility, such as YPOPs! in order to access their account through their email client. See www.ypopsemail.com for more information.

 

Hotmail (www.hotmail.com)

Hotmail is the original webmail service, having started in 1996 and being purchased by Microsoft a year later. It offers 250 MB of storage (with a 10 MB attachment limit) to users in 25 countries, including the United States. Users in other countries typically start with 25 MB, which is usually increased to 250 MB after a certain amount of time. Hotmail does not provide a POP3 server, but
simple workarounds are available. such as using a plugin like FreePOPs
(http://freepops.sourceforge.net).

 

RiseUp (www.riseup.net)

RiseUp.net, mentioned in several sections of this module, provides free and secure web-based email to activists. It provides 24 MB of storage and supports both POP3 and IMAP for users who wish to access their accounts through an email client. RiseUp is one of several tech collectives that provide secure email. A complete list of other providers is found in the subsection entitled “Email Security”.

 

 

Large Attachments

Activists will frequently find themselves needing to send or receive files that exceed the maximum attachment sizes permitted by their email providers. There are a few different ways of doing this:

 

1. Transfer the file physically, via CD, DVD, flash drive, or another medium.
2. If you have access to a web server, upload the file to it and provide the recipient with a link
3. Utilize a commercial service such as Whalemail (www.whalemail.com)

 

 

Email Security

Email security is addressed in the “Encryption and Data Security” section of this module.

 

 

Signature Files

You can save time composing your emails by creating a signature to be automatically appended to all the email sent from a particular address. The means by which this is accomplished vary from one email client to another, but it’s normally very simple. A signature consists of a standard block of text, and can even include hyperlinks. Typically, signatures consist of the sender’s name and detailed contact information.

 

 

General Email Etiquette

 

• Address recipients appropriately. Use the proper salutation, such as “Dr.”, “Mr.”, “Ms.”, and so on. If the gender of the recipient is not known, use their full name.
• DO NOT send attachments to anyone you don’t know without permission.

 

 

Mass Mailings

Most of the email generated by activist organizations is sent in bulk. Such bulk mailings are subject to a unique set of considerations. The following guidelines will maximize the chances that your intended recipients will both receive your message and proceed to open it.

 

Subject Lines

• Subject lines should be restricted to no more than 50 characters, or there’s a chance that some recipients won’t be able to view the entire line.

• Spam filters, intended to prevent the receipt of unsolicited commercial email, can be triggered by the use of various words such as “free”, “sale”, or “teens”. For additional examples of what to avoid, scan your own spam folders to identify common terms in the subject lines.

• Filters can also be triggered by the use of characters such as “$” and “!”, as well as by words or phrases typed entirely in capital letters.

 

CC and BCC Fields

The use of CC or BCC fields to send bulk email should be avoided unless the recipient list is limited to a half-dozen or so addresses. Many email providers automatically reject messages with more than a certain number of addresses contained within either of these fields. Mailing lists (listservs) or email blast services should be used instead. Also remember that recipients can see all addresses included in the “To:” or “CC” fields, so if you don’t want these addresses disclosed to all of your message recipients, don’t put them in
those fields.

 

Email Blast Services

In addition to mailing lists/listservs (discussed in the “Mailing Lists” section of this module), another good way of sending bulk email is to use a hosted email blast service. By making special arrangements with major email providers, these services reduce the likelihood of your message being rejected by the system.
Such services typically allow to you view statistics on how many recipients opened the message or clicked on a link contained within. Some of the more affordable services are:

 

GraphicMail (www.graphicmail.com)

A great entry-level service, GraphicMail allows nonprofit organizations to send 10,000 (total) emails for free via its email blast service (additional emails are priced at approximately one-half of one cent per email). When using this free option, GraphicMail branding is included in your messages. The branding can be disabled by upgrading to a fee-based service costing $20/year). GraphicMail has good HTML support, and even includes an editor, as well as a decent set of reporting tools.

 

Groundspring Email Now (www.groundspring.org)

Another good entry-level service, with a strong reputation for deliverability, and some nice reporting features. If you want to send HTML-formatted email, they must be created in a different application, and then pasted into Groundspring’s software. The service is priced at $19.95/ month for 10,000 emails and $1 or less for each additional 1000.

 

Electric Embers NPOGroups (www.electricembers.net)

NPOGroups is rather similar to Yahoo Groups (discussed in the “Mailing Lists” section of this module), with the major distinctions being additional control and flexibility, as well as lack of advertising. However, the use of HTML formatting is hampered by considerable hassle. Pricing is on a sliding scale, beginning at $10/month for 2500 subscribers, and $5 for each additional 5000.

More advanced email blast services such as Emma and CampaignMonitor could be worth looking at if your subscriber list surpasses 1000. Additionally, several hosted, integrated nonprofit suites, such as Democracy In Action and GetActive offer email blast services, but these are high-cost and may suit only
larger organizations. Finally, the open-source nonprofit suite, CivicSpace, offers an email blast utility, though deliverability may be an issue, since CivicSpace is not a hosted service like the others mentioned here. It’s also still under development, and the current version is rather limited – but the forthcoming release will provide additional features such as reporting tools and HTML support.

 

 

Hosted Nonprofit Suites

 

• Emma: www.myemma.com
• GetActive: www.getactive.com
• CampaignMonitor: www.campaignmonitor.com
• CivicSpace: www.civicspacelabs.com
• Democracy In Action: www.democracyinaction.org