My mailing system

All of my emails are sent to people who are involved with producing high speed digital electronic products. This list is used for no other purpose. Unless a person has multiple email addresses (in which case duplicates are possible) they will receive one email four weeks prior to a class in their area and a second email two weeks prior to the class.

All contacts are in the high speed digital system design business. Everyone in that business needs to solve Signal Integrity, Power Integrity, and Electromagnetic Compliance problems or they can not ship their product. If they do not ship, they do not get paid. I teach people how to solve those problems.

How did I get on this list?

I have been in the Signal Integrity & EMC consulting business since the 90's and have been giving about 40 classes per year world wide for over 10 years. I can not tell you how a specific email address got on the list. I can tell you that every effort has been made to limit the list to the microscopic portion of the population that even know what Signal Integrity, Power Integrity, and Electromagnetic Compliance actually means.

By definition the first email to a new email address is always “unsolicited.”

How do new people get on the list in the first place? The only reason I am in business is because my students and others in the industry believe that my class is important to the industry. Hence, managers will give me the email address of their key team leaders, salesmen will ask me to send an invitation to people whom they think would benefit from the class, IPC or EMC society may ask me to send an invitation to key people in a particular area. Some will email me and ask to be notified when I have a class in their area. In some cases an invitation is forwarded. The thing that does not work is leaving an "add me to the mailing list form" on the website. I have been over run with "bots" every time I tried that.

In an imperfect world, what can I do? I follow US Federal law and I also try to treat others as I wish to be treated.

Each email has my real name, my real email, my real website, ( my real address is on the website) , and my real telephone number.

Each email has a clear method to unsubscribe from the list.

Anyone who replies with “unsubscribe” in the header will be permanently blocked from my email system. I do this manually so I may take a day or two before I can confirm that the email has been blocked.

This system has one glaring issue. If the email they “unsubscribe” is not the email to which I have sent the original class notice, they can receive a second email. This happens because they have one email address forwarding into another email address. If contacts leave a company, their emails may be forwarded to the systems administrator. If the systems administrator says unsubscribe, the systems administrator is unsubscribed, not the person to whom I sent the invitation.

Whenever I spot this, I ask if they have other email addresses that are forwarding to the current email address. If they do not give me the forwarding email address, the unsubscribe does not work. I will not know which email address to block.

I do my level best to treat others as I wish to be treated. If you think I have abused your trust, call me up and chew me out. Terry Fox 425 391-8696