In 2003 I was living in Baringhup and going on the Newstead community walks organized by Frances Cincotta.

 

The walks were not at a regular day of the month and I did not otherwise go to Newstead to get a paper copy of the Echo to find out when the next walk was to be, so I asked to have a digital copy of the Echo used for printing to be emailed to me.

 

At about the same time I was beginning an interest in making websites, registered the impavid.org domain name and bought some web hosting from GCom.

 

I thought other people might like to have access to digital copies of the Echo as well, so I created echo.impavid.org which was the first version of Echo Online available for the March 2004 edition.

 

 

In November of that year I bought the newsteadecho.org domain name, with December 2004 being the first edition of Echo Online available from the newsteadecho.org website.

 

Modifications have been made to the newsteadecho.org website since it was created.

 

Initially it was necessary to visit the website to find out if a new Echo edition had been added to download; this could cause a person to waste a significant amount of time. To avoid this, a MailChimp subscription and notification system link was added to the website, which allowed new edition notifications to be sent to subscribers from the MailChimp website, indicating a new edition had been added to the Echo website.

 

After awhile the MailChimp system, which was mainly created for business email marketing, became too complicated to set up monthly to continue using it. To solve that problem, I created a simple subscription and notification system called Notify, and placed it on the Echo website. The only change necessary to the simple monthly notification was the edition date in the email Subject.

 

 

Junk email is a major problem with internet use in terms of irritation and time wasting for people receiving it, in the Echo situation that happens to be the volunteer committee members, particularly those involved in editing contributor emails each month.

 

The junk mail volume is minimized because no Echo email addresses are shown on the website, but recently the volume of junk increased significantly; much more than I thought the editors should be subjected to.

 

The system that existed, where all email (including junk) received as “contributions” were automatically forwarded to the editors, was changed to an automated filtering system.

 

The email address of an incoming “contribution” is checked against a list of email addresses of previously verified genuine contributors. If the incoming email address matches one in the list, it is automatically forwarded to editors; if not the email is checked manually to determine whether it is a legitimate contribution or junk.

If it is legitimate, the email address is added to the verified contributors list.