PVA Subscriber List Maintenance
The website currently has over 2,600 visits a month from the Prestwood Community. We thank you all for your support. When newsletters are sent out from the website they are sent to a subscriber list. This area is usually self managing. Anyone who has subscribed and decides to be forgotten by the website will stop the newsletters reaching their inboxes. This is for GDPR compliance. From time to time we remove those people that have expressed a wish to be forgotten by erasing their records from the website. Around 50 people have done that over the past year, and we have maintained over 1000 subscribers so the system is working. For the rest of you, we assume you are happy to receive the newsletters.
In an effort to reduce junk mail some of the free email providers are monitoring email boxes for messages which are never read. If a sender continues to send mail to these users, there is a risk that the messages will be blocked from everyone on that system i.e. Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail.
The PVA website records who has opened a newsletter message. Our readership is quite high and working well, but within the 1000 or so subscribers there is a group of people (around 100) who have not opened a newsletter over the past year. In September we will be removing these email addresses from our system to ensure that their lack of activity does not affect those that do open them up and review them.
This message is going out to those specific people through a special alert email (not a regular newsletter). If you see this post in your inbox you need to take action and open it and read it in full if you wish to remain on the subscriber list. By opening the message your subscription is no longer at risk. Those who do not open the special news alert are at risk of being removed. If you are removed, and wish to re-subscribe, you are free to do so.
Currently we anticipate the inactive subscribers will be removed after September 15th 2021. If you have not been contacted about this, then you are unaffected by this action.
Thank you for the response Geoff. Let me start by answering your question generally, and then specifically with regards to Prestwood Village Association.
If an individual decides to hide their activity such as not accepting cookies, or using private browser mode, or a VPN which hides their location, then in many cases they will keep their identity and activities secret. It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.
In the case of an email directed to just you, if you click on a link in the email irrespective of whom it is from, that click can be registered by the server, and therefore the server knows that the email address has someone sitting on the end of it. Clicking on a link may also cause a virus to be downloaded to your device. So you do need to take great care.
Hackers and people engaged in identity theft use these techniques all of the time when sending out junk mail. It is also the case that if you automatically download image files in your email application then the server knows that someone has opened the email. That is why most email applications have that function turned off unless you wish to view the images.
Prestwood Village Association newsletter emails however do have some preamble in them to identify who we are and why we are sending the message to you before you click on anything.
All the PVA website records within the application that sends out emails is your email address (so we know where to send it to), your name or whatever name you gave us when you subscribed, and your postal code if you provided that. We can also see how frequently someone reads the newsletter. We do not know which newsletters, or anything else about the activity. We do not use this for any other purpose than the management of the website to ensure everyone gets the best experience. In fact 99.9% of the time nobody pays any attention to this information.
Now it is quite possible that you have very effectively hidden your activity, there is nothing wrong with that. However by hiding your activity, we do not know if you are “active” or “inactive”. If the newsletter function knows nothing about you, then you are an “inactive user” as far as the website is concerned. We cannot determine anything else. The worse case if this is true, is that your subscription will be deleted. You will not receive any more PVA newsletters after September 2021. If you wish to continue receiving them, just re-subscribe. We will look at this again in 12 months time.
I fully support the concept of maintaining a secure and safe presence online because there is a lot of malicious content on the internet and entering our email boxes every day. However some of the tracking, as limited as it is, is there for everyone’s benefit.
The issue I am trying to avoid is: subscribers who use free email accounts at Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail (there are probably others), are at risk if there is a small proportion of other users who never open up newsletters or general mailings. Those organisations will tag it as junk mail. If it gets tagged as junk mail it will not be seen by other users on the same system. That is the reason why we are taking this action. It just cleans up the subscriber list because the assumption is there are many people that signed up who are no longer interested and do not open the mailings.
There is also some evidence in the past that people on the TalkTalk network or the BT networks have suddenly had their newsletters blocked for no apparent reason. When that happens it takes a lot of effort to sort out and re-establish communications. TalkTalk and BT may be using a similar method of tracking how many emails get opened in an effort to reduce junk mail in their systems.
If you are still concerned send a message to info@prestwoodva.org.uk and if I can help in any way I will get privately in contact with you.
For anyone else reading this, if you have any concerns about receiving the newsletter, you can unsubscribe at any time. There is a link at the bottom of each newsletter which will cancel your subscription. You remain in control of your account with us.
Mark Wingrove
Web Developer
PVA Committee.
Are you sure of this? I would hope that you would have no idea whether I have
read the “inactive-pva-subsribers” message. Please advise !! I try to keep my
browser secure and avoid as much as possible unwanted feedback