From us to you

Part of our having a website with lots of (we hope) interesting information is our wish that you read it and keep up to date with our doings. Sometime last century, the e-newsletter was born: the online equivalent of the catalogues and other bulk mail which drops through our letterboxes at home and at work. Frankly, its time has come and gone: there are much better ways to keep customers informed.

We know that many e-newsletters soon make the drift from 'bulk e-mail' to 'junk e-mail' in individual recipients' eyes, and that many are shredded by spam countermeasures, simply because they are (to a machine) indistinguishable from spam. But before they even reach the anti-spam boxes, bulk mailings clog up the internet, slowing it down for all of us, particularly when they are bloated in size by lots of formatting, graphics and worse (sound and video, for example); if the newsletter gets through, it contributes to e-mail storage, and pushes you towards or beyond any quota. And all of that content is almost certainly retrievable from a website: it does not need to be replicated on your PC.

The current answer lies somewhere along the line of alert feeds. You will have seen them in many places, from the obituaries in The Times to individual (and very individual!) websites and blogs. We are looking in this area, but we just want to make sure that everything is above board with whomever and however we decide to use as our alert manager, so that you do not get bombarded with irrelevant or nuisance alerts and mail. We want to put as much power as possible into your hands so that you can decide which parts of our website are to be monitored for your alerts, but we want to do it as responsibly as we can.

If you subscribe to other alerts, you will see that they are all very tiny messages with a one-click access to the information: much more efficient and responsible than sending all the information to everyone at the same time. If you need to register the sender to by-pass spam-tests (sometimes known as whitelisting), you will find that there is far less chance of miscategorisation with that address and those small messages.

We have chosen to work with Google in providing our alert service: we only took this plunge after checking on the system to ensure the security of your contact details (we don't keep any contact details in the alert process). The last thing we'd want to do is to open your address to yet more tidal waves of spam and viruses. In the meantime, please keep checking our website. You might even pop a recurrent task into your online calendar system which reminds you every now and then to do just that!