Subject: Re: Mass mails for INNS BigData 2018
From: "Bill Howell. Hussar. Alberta. Canada" <>
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2017 08:48:52 -0600
To: Jose Antonio Iglesias <>
Cc: Simone Scardapane <>,

Actually, use of an email server is completely independent of my [operating system, email program, ISP provider] : 
  • It is a separate server that simply [sends, forwards replies], and can handle >>20,000 email addresses (the annual email server cost may depend on the number, I can't remember).  The largest email list I've used is ~24,000.
  • I pay (out of my pocket) 262.50$CDN per year for that (I paid the annual bill only a week or so ago). 
  • The email list comes from a spreadsheet (not a database, which I almost never find practical), and is updated and cleaned . 
  • Filters are used to select email for the appropriate conference from [WCCI, IJCNN, BigDat&DeepLearn]
  • The filtered list is copy-pasted into a text file.
  • The email itself is composed in HTML (you could use any other standard like [text, rtf, whatever], and I do that in a text file, not in Thunderbird. 
  • In Thunderbird I paste the HTML into an email that is sent to the server.
  • After logging onto the email server, the old email list on the server is deleted, and the new email list is uploaded.
  • I double-check that "remove requests" are NOT present in the server email address list
  • I carefully review the submitted mass email (described above) as it is somewhat easy to send the wrong email list
  • I've sometimes had to send several emails because of a server problem, and that raises the chances of an error, and is a lot of extra work (uploading the lists is not fast).
  • I approve of the submitted mass email (actually - that could have been sent by  anybody), which is then distributed.
So your [operating system, email program, ISP provider] is irrelevant here, it is the use of an email server that is important.  My normal account can accommodate 50-100 emails (I forget the number, and that may have increased over the years), and perhaps it would be possible to pay more to have that limit increase, but it is [cleaner, safer, more efficient] to use an email server rather than my own account, and that allows me to easily cut off incoming emails to my own account in case of problems.


Mr. Bill Howell
1-587-707-2027     www.BillHowell.ca
P.O. Box 299, Hussar, Alberta, T0J1S0
member - International Neural Network Society (INNS), IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE-CIS)
IJCNN2017 Anchorage Publications Chair, mass emails, www.ijcnn.org
WCCI2018 Rio de Janiero : Publicity committee, http://www.ecomp.poli.br/~wcci2018/committees/
Retired: Science Research Manager (SE-REM-01) at Natural Resources Canada, CanmetMINING, Ottawa


Jose Antonio Iglesias wrote on 04/07/17 07:59 AM:
Dear Simone,

In my case, I was using Gmail - from my university email account- , so I had to send several mails (I can not remember which was the maximum amount of contact you can send an email). I remember that I could not find a "better" way to do this...

Best Regards,

José Antonio Iglesias.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jose Antonio Iglesias Martínez
Carlos III University of Madrid / Computer Science Department
Area: Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Office: 2.1.B17 / Phone: 91 624 94 24 /
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2017-07-04 15:53 GMT+02:00 Simone Scardapane <>:
Hi Bill,

Thanks again for the material; I see that you are using Thunderbird, don't you have a strict limit on the number of recipients? I have found this add-on, maybe it can be of interest:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mail-merge/

José, do you have a simpler workflow for sending the mass emails?

Cheers,
Simone


Il 03/07/2017 17:46, Bill Howell. Hussar. Alberta. Canada ha scritto:
Asim Roy and Plamen Angelov would know that.  From a 2015 conference mass email :
"The Elsevier USD 2000 Big Data Best Paper Award",

This award recognizes the best paper presented at the INNS Big Data conference. Both application and theoretical papers will be considered.
It will be awarded by the Big Data Analytics Section of the International Neural Network Society and is sponsored by Elsevier.
The Award consists of a plaque and a $2000 honorarium.
Other than that I don't remember any special arrangements on the papers (perhaps a special publications), and I would have to do more searching for that.

Teck Hou, Julio -  As per my email to Simone below, I [rapidly, incoherently] threw together background material on mass emails (and a bit of general publicity info) to help a general chair of a conference.  If either of you have [insights, suggestions, planning lists] that you would like to add, let me know.  The easiest is usually when you've already provided pertinent points in old emails or reports etc.



Bill


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject:     Re: Mass mails for INNS BigData 2018
Date:     Thu, 29 Jun 2017 16:28:56 -0600
From:     Bill Howell. Hussar. Alberta. Canada <>
To:     Simone Scardapane. Publicity Co-Chair. INNS BigData-DeepLearn2018. Sapienza Uof Roma. Italy <it>


Thanks for the reminder, Simone -  attached is the current list of mass emails pertinent to INNS-BigDat&DeepLearn, plus the list of 485 or so "Removal requests".  The latter are NOT in the current list I am sending to you, but as you evolve your mass email list you should remove the listed emails from sendouts.  In August I plan to send a special request to older emails to see if they want to be added back in, but I don't expect much response for that.   I don't think that there are any significant additions to the "legitimate" emails since the last you had, but I didn't check.   There have been many deletions - bad addresses as people move on, removal requests, etc, which helps to keep the robot responses down so that it's easier to handle legitimate feedback and questions from recipients.

I just got the WCCI mass email out this morning after 4.5 days works and delays from previous [events, projects].   Plus, in response to a request that I denied to be Publicity Chair for another conference, this morning I spent 5.4 hours thus morning to put together material on NN conference publicity that includes some of your past comments :
http://www.billhowell.ca/Neural%20nets/Neural%20network%20conference%20publicity/

Most of that will be old news to you, but it might be handy as a [random, scattered] checklist, and although details of managing and updating mass email lists and responses are too complicated for what you need, there still might be handy points to pick out here and there.  Note that the number of "[legitimate, remove] emails" is lower than the count, as 5-10% of emails have errors I (these are automatically removed by the email server that I use).

Cheers,


Mr. Bill Howell
1-587-707-2027     www.BillHowell.ca
P.O. Box 299, Hussar, Alberta, T0J1S0
member - International Neural Network Society (INNS), IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE-CIS)
IJCNN2017 Anchorage Publications Chair, mass emails, www.ijcnn.org
WCCI2018 Rio de Janiero : Publicity committee, http://www.ecomp.poli.br/~wcci2018/committees/
Retired: Science Research Manager (SE-REM-01) at Natural Resources Canada, CanmetMINING, Ottawa


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Mass mails for INNS BigData 2018
Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2017 09:59:02 +0200
From: Simone Scardapane <it>
To: Hendro Nurhadi <>
CC: , TENG Teck Hou <>, www.BillHowell.ca <>,


Dear Hendro,

The conference is not indexed by IEEE, so we can only use our own list of emails for which we have permission by INNS. As far as I know we don't use EDAS or similar systems, the emails were sent by Bill (first edition) and José (second edition), maybe they can provide more information?

Cheers,
Simone

Il 02/07/2017 03:50, Hendro Nurhadi ha scritto:
Dear Simone, and all,

Sorry for being so late replying your email, since we do have here in Indonesia national holidays started from June 23 till July 03, 2017.

Sending mass email, according to conf tool such as EDAS, easychair or similar conf tools, they procide us to do so.

The questions are:
1. Do we use conf tools (e.g. EDAS, easychair, etc.)?
2. Is our conf also submitted and/or indexed by IEEE Xplore, so we can blasting emails through their support?

Salaam,
hendro


On Jun 30, 2017, at 04:12, Simone Scardapane <> wrote:

Dear Hendro,

Any news on below? We should start with the mass emails but I don't have this possibility from my home institution, so in case we should find an alternative.

Cheers,
Simone

Il 12 giu 2017 18:59, "Simone Scardapane" <> ha scritto:

Dear all,

We received the permission from Prof. Kozma to start the sending of mass emails for 8 emails before the conference. On this topic:

  1. For Bill: can you send us the latest version of the list and its format?
  2. For Hendro: do you have any experience sending the mass email, and/or the possibility to do so?

Cheers,
Simone



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___________________________________________
Il tuo 5 diventa 1000
Fai crescere la tua università
Dona il 5 per mille alla Sapienza
Codice fiscale: 80209930587


___________________________________________
Il tuo 5 diventa 1000
Fai crescere la tua università
Dona il 5 per mille alla Sapienza
Codice fiscale: 80209930587