Monday, January 31, 2005

Mass Mailing

Sent out a mail today reminding people of the upcoming workshop early-bird registration deadline. The e-mail went to our Web site update list, which is currently at 2343 users.

One interesting event on this "blast" ... the swt.edu (Texas State University - San Marcos) domain name servers no longer respond with any info for the domain. Somebody's gonna get hell for that one. Initially I was removing the e-mail addresses, but the shear number made me realize this was due to DNS problems and not invalid e-mail addresses.

Also of note, fixed a minor problem with the send scripts I had introduced when performing some other updates. I hadn't tested these updates because they weren't integral to the ASP code but were part of the JavaScript interface code (and were fairly minor to boot). I think I un-did a code fix I had used when initially creating the code. The JavaScript in question creates a standard footer for text-based e-mail. A combination of factors was causing theh ASP interpreter to think it needed to process a portion of the code:
  • The footer indicated the user's e-mail address for reference purposes using the format <user@address.com>.
  • Since this is generated for each address I needed to use a placeholder for the e-mail address. This is currently of the form %MASSMAIL_RECIPIENT%.
  • The combination of the two produces the ASP-like code <%MASSMAIL_RECIPIENT%> which throws and error for a couple of reasons.
So that it would not be processed by the ASP interpreter, I modified the JavaScript code as follows:
"<" + "%MASSMAIL_RECIPIENT%>"