Tag Archive - email

How to ensure you are never contacted again

April 16, 2010 in for Churches, Pastors

Have you ever seen this before? It was the response I received when contacting a company about their worship presentation software:

“Dear Steven,

Thanks for your email, but at this point I have NOT actually received your message because I have implemented a challenge-response anti-spam system.

Before I can receive your message you must respond as outlined below.

Once you have done this once I will receive your ORIGINAL and all FUTURE messages.

Just reply to this email message – just make sure that the subject of your reply contains the subject of this message.

If you do not respond within 7 days, your message will be DELETED and I will not be able to receive messages from you in the future.

I apologize for this one-time inconvenience, but I have been forced to implement this challenge-response anti-spam solution due to the amount of spam I am receiving.

Thank you,

Sales”

If you’re having problems with spam, use Gmail (on its own, or as part of the suite of Google Apps). It’s got a lot of tools to keep spam out of your inbox. This is a much better (i.e. customer-friendly) solution to requiring potential customers to re-send messages.

From where I’m sitting there are two options:

  1. Receive no spam, but stop receiving emails from some potential clients/customers/visitors.
  2. Receive spam, but receive emails from all potential clients/customer/visitors.

Seems like an easy choice to me. Thankfully, this is the first time I’ve come across this ‘anti-spam’ procedure. But if your church or ministry uses this (or something similar), please turn it off!

Gmail’s new ‘remind me’ service

March 31, 2010 in Christian Living, Pastors

Have you ever sent an email and not received a reply? Silly question! Sometimes this doesn’t matter, but sometimes the reply is important and it’s messy adding a calendar item along the lines of “check to see if Troy replied to my email”.

Help is here!

I just noticed this in my Gmail account:

This new feature enables you to set a reminder to follow up with your recipient if you haven’t heard back from them (via email) within your designated time-frame.

Useful tool.

I’m not sure if it has been enabled on all Gmail accounts, or if it’s just being tested on a few. Can you see it?

Update

Some people have written in and not know where they should be looking to see this new service. Here are a couple of screenshots to show you what I’m seeing:

5 dangers of using technology in the Christian life

March 14, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches, Outreach, Pastors

Last weekend I presented a seminar at my church’s weekend away on the topic ‘Using technology in your Christian life’. I am tidying up these notes to be included in an upcoming post. In the meantime, I’d like to explore the dangers of technology. Obviously I’m a big fan-boy of technology, but it’s got its dangers. We need to be aware of these to ensure we don’t become a victim, and instead use technology for the glory of God. Here are five dangers that were raised in the seminar or that I’ve thought of. What would you add to this list?

  1. Alienation. Someone shared that they had been excluded from social events because they didn’t have a Facebook account. That’s not very nice. If lack of access to technology excludes people from community, this should raise warning bells. At the very least, there should be more than one way for people to access information – limiting communication about an event to one channel (e.g. Facebook) is exclusive as it assumes that people a) have access to technology (e.g. Facebook), and b) want to use it. We should assume neither.
  2. Addiction. This example of a South Korean couple starving their child to death while caring for a virtual child is at the extreme end of the spectrum. But the need to be plugged-in, to know what’s happening, to read updates, to share updates is a modern and unhelpful phenomenon that has the Center for Internet Addiction. If only we felt the same eagerness to read God’s word and pursue our relationship with Him. On a more light-hearted note, wondering if you’re addicted to Twitter? Try this fun quiz. Apparently I’m 45% addicted to Twitter. It’s a fine line between engagement and addiction. Other posts I’d recommend include: ‘Addicted to tweets‘, ‘Excessive internet use linked to depression‘, and ‘Enabled or enslaved by technology?‘.
  3. Laziness. Some things are best communicated face-to-face, or at least over the phone. Technology allows us to be lazy and laziness is never good. For example, sending your Bible study leader a text message to let them know that you won’t be coming tonight. That’s lazy – if you are not going to be there, it’s courteous to pick up the phone and apologise and explain. It’s easier to send a text, but for the benefit of your leader who has spent hours preparing and who is responsible for caring for you, it’s not a good option.
  4. Potential to sin. I’m not sure if our opportunities to sin have increased with technology, or if we’re simply more aware of them. But take for example Facebook – it can prompt jealousy and envy (I wish I had what she has), pride (posting status updates to promote ourselves), lust (looking at unhelpful photos of people), gossip (sharing news on Facebook, or that we heard on Facebook) about others. The list goes on. Sure, Facebook didn’t invent jealousy, envy, pride, lust and gossip – but it sure makes these sins easy to fall into!
  5. Wasting time. Nielsen recently revealed the extent of time spent on Facebook, and how this is increasing. On this site I shared how Australians spend 29% of all time online, on Facebook. I know I seem to be picking on Facebook – I’m not, it just provides lots of good examples! Technology can make us more efficient and productive, but it can also just help us to waste time. And we waste a lot. When the Master returns, I want to be busy doing his business, not procrastinating on Facebook.

What would you add to this list?

(Feature image attribution – it’s a light-hearted image for a more serious topic! http://www.flickr.com/photos/paloetic/ / CC BY-NC 2.0)

“Email owns me”

February 15, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches, Pastors

A week ago, Christian blogger Tim Challies shared a personal revelation:

“I recently came to the realization that email owns me. A good technology that should be at my disposal has instead taken over and put me at its disposal. And if you’ve read Postman you’ll know that technology is very good at this. No sooner do we put a technology in our service than we find that it has so changed our lives that suddenly we have become enslaved to it.”

How many of us can relate to this feeling?

You can read the full post here, with Tim’s resolutions for dealing with this realisation.

Are you owned by your email?

Don’t ridicule your customers

February 12, 2010 in for Churches

I’m back in the saddle after an awesome wedding and honeymoon! Praise God!

I’ve been trawling through my emails (as you do when you return from holidays), and came across an interesting email from Magnation. I subscribe to their emails for news on interesting magazine releases. Their e-newsletter this time around was promoting Valentine’s Day purchases, with some not-too-subtle references to sex – basically suggesting that buying a magazine for a loved one will lead to more sex. This approach isn’t particularly unexpected in modern marketing. What was unexpected was the footer at the bottom of the email which read:

“Complaints about our resorting to sexual references to sell a product can be directed to info@magnation.com.

Please put in the subject box “I am a prude and I deserve a spanking” and we will do our best to respond to you in an appropriate and sensitive manner. And if you want to unsubscribe you can do so here. We promise to not publicly ridicule you or publish your name in the obituaries columns, although you will of course, be dead to us.”

Was the insensitive work experience student steering the ship in the marketing department the day this email was sent out?!

I’m not sure how ridiculing your customers can ever be seen as a good approach to increasing sales or promoting good will. Sure, it might make you look edgy and cool to a particular demographic within your subscriber base, but it’s at the expense of alienating another (perhaps larger) bunch of customers. Is that worth it?

I wasn’t particularly offended by the email, but I was by the footer – though its font size was small, its impact was significant.

What’s the message for us as Christian communicators with many of our churches using email newsletters? Every part of the message, from head to toe, is important. Read and re-read what you’ve written. And if you’re going to offend, make sure it’s worth it.

Save time and can email responses

December 17, 2009 in Christian Living, for Churches, Pastors

Are there some email responses that you send quite regularly? Perhaps you are replying to the same questions over and over again, for example:

  • What are the service times for your church?
  • What are the bank details to give to the church?
  • Can you add me to the list to receive the weekly email newsletter?
  • I’d like to join the church – how do I do this?
  • I want to become a Christian – how do I do this? (wouldn’t it be great if that were a common question!)

If you have ever had the need to write the answer to the same question twice, you might benefit from using Google’s canned responses. Launched in 2008, I only just discovered this handy tool a couple of week’s ago when a friend put me onto it.

Canned responses allows you to save a response to easily re-use it on another occasion. They save you from re-typing the email from scratch. They save you from having to dig around to find the response you gave to the same question three months ago.

Of course, you can adjust any of the response to customise them as you need, and you can add text before, after or in the middle of the canned response, but  simply having the pre-written response on-hand can be a real time-saver. Other uses of this tool including adding signatures to the bottom of emails, or creating templates for weekly roster reminders, or weekly emails to your Bible study group.

If you use a Mac, but don’t use email, you might like to try out a tool called TextExpander (explained in more detail, along with some other email tips, in ‘8 tips for email liberation‘).

But if you don’t use Gmail, perhaps it’s time you switched – there’s lots of benefits to using this tool to manage your email!

It’s easy to import your email to Google from another web-based email account (e.g. Hotmail), and even if you don’t want to use a Gmail account, you can send and receive your email, using the Gmail interface, by importing your mail settings.

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