Today, I received a request to remove a person from one of my e-mails. And he made the point that my e-mail did not have an option to remove him from my mailing list. The problem is that I use multiple channels with multiple mailing lists. What does that mean?

At present, my day is spent on managing a complex web of activities. These activities fall broadly into brands, some of which have not yet been publicised.

EIPPWorld.com, ForesightNorth and Northern StartUp 2.0 are divisions of eveo Ltd.

	Product development to sales and marketing.
	Building an ecosystem for digital businesses in the North.
	Think tank on regional economic development
eveo (no logo yet)	Advisory/consultancy service for businesses including social media
	Advisory/analysis on finance automation utilising e-invoicing

In addition, ebdex is dead (yet to find how to kill the website) and evigon, which was originally intended as the consulting vehicle need to be removed from the companies house.

Since moving to Mac OS X, I use built-in Address Book with Bento to manage my contacts. Bento extends the functionality of Address Book and has similar functionality to Microsoft Access. 

I have also been using icontact.com for managing mailshots, but my account has a limit of 500 addresses and 3000 messages per month. I do not maintain a permanent list of e-mail addresses on icontact.com. When needed, I simply upload a list of addresses, send the mailshot and delete.

icontact.com is a great tool as it provides feedback on the success of mailshots sent, but has the limitations due to my account limitations. Until recently, I did not really appreciate edocr as a replacement to icontact.com, which infact is available to anyone free of charge.

This is how it works at edocr.

1. Upload the document to www.edocr.com
2. Visit the document page and choose "Email this doc" from right hand sidebar (see first image below).
3. Write your personal message. Keep this short. The formatting of final output is not ideal. Until this is fixed somepoint in the future, please test by sending to one of your own e-mail addresses. I use <font size="-2">type your message here</font>
4. Once you are happy with the test message, enter list of e-mail addresses one line per e-mail address. Please make sure there are no blank lines among the addresses and all addresses are in compliance with general e-mail guidelines. You may want to add your e-mail address at the bottom to test that the message has been sent successfully.
5. edocr will now start sending your message to each of the e-mail addresses you entered. (see third image below). Any errors on e-mail addresses including away from e-mail messages will be sent direct to your e-mail account (not to your edocr account).

Image 1 - "See Email this doc"

Image 2 - Enter your message and e-mail addresses

Image 3 - Email sent by edocr

Not a bad tool at all, given it is still our first cut. Obviously lot more need to be done to improve this and present it as a challenger to highly successfull tools such as icontact.com. This will be just a functionality for edocr, and never the key reason for building edocr into your day-to-day tool kit.

Getting back to the original problem, this still means managing all e-mail addresses within Mac Address Book and then using Bento to remove/add addresses to various groups. So, if you want me to remove your e-mail address from a mailing list (that is a group within the Address Book), you need to be specific, which is not straight forward due to not knowing which business that e-mail address belongs to.

Here is an example: The following document was e-mailed to over 1000 people in my "Northern StartUp 2.0" group in my Address Book.

The question is, was this an e-mail from edocr or Northern StartUp 2.0? It is clearly from Northern StartUp 2.0 using edocr as a tool to generate the e-mail. But the recipient will most likely not see the difference. Now this is a dilemma I need to figure out, and until I do, please accept my apologies. If you want me to remove you from a mailing list, please be specific as much as possible.

Tags: icontact.com, e-mail marketing, email marketing, edocr