Status-Q

There are many of you, gentle readers, who are kind enough to allow Status-Q posts to be sent directly to your email inboxes. (There's a link at the top right of the web page, for anyone else interested!)

In the past, this has been done using Mailchimp, but I've had reservations about this for some time, partly because I had very limited control over how parts of the message were formatted, and partly because it required you to hand over your details to a third-party company whose record is not entirely untarnished. (I know at least one reader who unsubscribed because he had concerns about Mailchimp.)

Well, as of today, I'm switching over to a new system, where the outgoing mails come from an instance of the rather good Open Source package ListMonk, which is running on my own server. No doubt there may be some teething troubles, so please bear with me if so, but now I should at least be able to fix them!

I notified all the existing subscribers that this was going to happen, and if this still appears in your inbox... the new system is working!

Ah - here's an idea, following on from the last post...

I've always wished I could have an email address that cost the sender 1p per message. That would have such a nice effect on spam while not really inconveniencing anyone else, once the system was set up. But here's a refinement of the idea:

Imagine that, when you sent a message, you could choose how much you wanted to pay. And inboxes were sorted, by default, with the most expensive messages at the top. You could override the order, of course, for friends and family, but would this be a good way of prioritising your email? Or am I taking capitalism too far?

It would have different dynamics, of course, depending on whether the money earned went to the recipient or, say, to a charity of their choice. How about that? If you really want to get my attention, it will involve a £1 donation to Oxfam. (Remember, a transatlantic call might have cost you a lot more than that anyway). I'd even be happy to read a lot of your spam at that rate...