CampaignFoundations.com

What Happened to my Subject Line?

One of CampaignFoundations.com's clients wrote me today to ask what happened to the subject line of the email she sent to one of her lists we host on our servers. While mailman's content filters did a great job of cleaning up her post as it will be saved in the archives, in our plain text email clients her subscribers saw an ugly subject line looking like this:

To: cure-news@lists.reparationsthecure.org
Subject: [Cure-news] =?windows-1252?q?REPARATIONS_PRESS_RELEASE_-_An_Obama?=
 =?windows-1252?q?_Presidency=3A_America=92s_Great_Deception?=

I wrote her: "It appears you copy and pasted it from a word processing document. What application did you use to compose the email?"

On examination of her email headers, I see she was using:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
        rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060729 SeaMonkey/1.0.4

Seamonkey's email client should not have created this issue for her. I responded, "I'd guess you have some sort of character encoding issue, but I'm not really sure."

She wrote back to acknowledge, "I dropped it in from Word - never had that happen before".

I wrote her back to suggest:

Next time try saving as a plain text file with extension .txt.
Then open it in notepad (NOT wordpad) and examine it for issues.
Notepad is a "plain text editor".  See:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor

Clean up what you see in notepad, then do your cut and paste
into your email client.  You should see much better results.

I compose EVERYTHING I write, whether a love letter or source
code in vim (Vi-Improved).  Its a plain text editor.  If I
need the gizmos provided by a word processor or by page layout
software, I open my completed draft in OpenOffice or Scribus
to complete the job for distribution.  (I almost never do this).

If I receive an M$ Word document as an attachment, I use
antiword or catdoc to parse the M$ Word markup from the plain
text contained within.  I redirect the results to a .txt file,
edit and format that using vim, for redistribution.

You don't have to be a computer programmer or systems administrator to enjoy the benefits of a plain text editor. You don't have to surmount Vim's learning curve to do so either. In an MS windows installation you have access to Notepad which will admirably serve your needs. (There are others available as well, including some licensed under the GPL). On a mac machine, try TextEdit.

Neatness Counts

It is important that when we CAMPAIGN, that is, when we expend our energy to deliver a focused message to a targeted audience whom we wish to engage in political action toward a public policy goal, that we take the time to ensure our message is as easy to digest for our audience as is possible. Email's effectiveness has been greatly dimished by overloaded inboxes (bursting both with spam and for more and more of us, with legitimate email). It has been diminished by our over-reliance on email. Too many of us use it when a paper mailing might work better, or picking up the phone would produce better results.

It is important that if we're to move someone to take action, that we show them the respect of not asking them to work too hard to read what we send them. How often have you received an email which was filled with mispellings, grammar and syntax errors or was poorly formatted or was otherwise difficult on the eyes to read and digest? Did you take the time to get through it? Did you appreciate having received the message? Did you spend your energy taking the action it urged?

Those who subscribe to the lists we host for your organization or campaign are no more tolerant of a poorly formatted message than you are. Many of them may be less tolerant.

To be effective, please take the time and energy to ensure your communications project the highest standards of professionalism which your candidate, issue, members and constituents deserve. The results will be worth the energy.