Jeffrey McManus

Stick a fork in email. It’s done.

Years ago my pal Angie started a happy hour listserv in San Francisco. She did it to hang out with friends and to get to know the city better. It was great fun for the year and a half or so that it went on.

Now I’m trying to do the same thing. I started working in San Jose in May and this city might as well be Pluto to me. I have no idea where to go to get a good martini here. More importantly, I only know like five people in my company. I demand cross-pollenization.

So took two stabs at setting up a happy hour listserv. I used some otherwise-excellent email server software that I run on one of my home servers. It was easy to set up, but it sent out notifications in the form of multiple blind CCs. Big no-no — lots of corporate admins, including ours, filter out inbound blind CCs at the edge of the network as an anti-spam tactic.

So I figured that a hosted service would do the trick. Surely they would understand the right way to do this. I chose Topica (mainly because they aren’t Yahoo). And their offering isn’t bad; low-volume lists are free (supported by ads and targeted offers). However, we ran into another snag: the corporate networking gnomes appear to be filtering outbound email addressed to Topica at the edge of the network.

So it appears to be impossible to set up a listserv that is comprised of internal and external email addresses. Without writing my own, of course.

Looks like I’ll have to set up a Weblog to do what I want to do, even though that won’t quite fit the bill for notifying people where happy hour’s going to be each week. I am Jack’s white-hot ball of rage.

Related posts:

1. Why Email is Bad
2. How To Coexist with Google: Answer Your Email
3. Patty Seybold on Office 2.0