Incoming Email to BellaOnline

It is great to be optimistic and to live in a theoretical world, where each editor could receive unlimited emails each day, and to then read and process them all without limit. But the reality of life is that each editor only has 10mb in her mail account to hold incoming mail. Server space costs money each month, and that is our budget. Let's say a given editor - they are all volunteers, remember, not being paid - is able to check and download her email once a day. That means the maximum amount of email she could receive in that day is 10mb before email starts to be blocked from coming in to her. That email account is how her visitors contact her with questions, mass-mailed newsletters get sent to her with generic information, interview responses come in for articles she is working on, and so on. She does not have unlimited ability to receive mail, to start. Therefore, only mail which she feels is important should come in to that box.

Second, she does not have unlimited time to read, respond to and file those email messages. Most editors here work "real jobs" that pay their bills, and have families and homes to care for. They only have a certain amount of time each day to dedicate to their BellaOnline site. For some editors, that is an hour a day. Remember, they write weekly articles here - not daily articles. So each week they post a fresh article, and during the week they answer email and check on their forums. So they simply do not have the time available to read through 5,000 email messages in a given day. It's a simple fact of life. Surely, if you yourself got 5,000 email messages every day, you would not have time to read every one, every day. There is always a limit of time.

It is therefore critical that each message they choose to receive in is the highest quality message, pertaining directly to their topic. For example a soccer editor might be offered a *superb* tennis newsletter - but she would not subscribe. It would take time away from the time block she had dedicated to her topic. Undoubtedly the soccer editor is offered *thousands* of soccer-topic newsletters. She isn't going to subscribe to them all!! That would more than exceed her time and quota. Out of the plethora of options available, she chooses the ones that are the very best suited to her topic.

Let's say your newsletter is a New Age newsletter. Again, there are literally thousands and thousands of new age newsletters out there. Yours is one of the *many* options. Our New Age editor may choose not to subscribe to yours, out of the many that are available to her. If it is being said that yours is not a "top choice", that is a good time to evaluate what might be done better. The layout of the newsletter? The ease of reading of the fonts? The writing style? The frequency? There are entire books dedicated to how to write a newsletter which is read, enjoyed and forwarded.

Remember, you are promoting a product - your newsletter. You can't ever force someone to accept a product. You have to design and craft a product which people are clamoring to get, and eagerly awaiting. If you were faxing messages to a fax machine, surely you wouldn't argue that your faxes had a right to go to it, even when it is actively preventing other faxes from getting through. We pay for our bandwidth of the incoming mail, none of this is free. Email isn't unlimited, and neither is the 24 hrs in a day that the human being has available to read and deal with them. That is what quality content is all about - designing content that is so much better than other options, that it is chosen while others are not chosen.