2006 AAMGA Technology Conference

[rmccallum]

Well another AAMGA Tech Conf. has come and gone. There was a nice crowd at the open source round table. Thanks to everyone who voiced their opinions and suggestions. Hopefully we can continue those discussions in this forum. I am hoping to be able to send an email out to all of the attendees of the conference just to make it known that this site exists. I could use some help on the most politically correct way to go about this or if should even be done.

[KLowry@Thomco]

Sounds like a great idea.  I don't think there is any problem sending a short introductory email to the attendee list -- certainly no worse than the vendors that sent one.

[cquirk]

I agree. I believe I received too many emails from vendors, so what is one more. It appears there is not too much more activity here on the forum. I did not catch everyone's name but it appeared there were at least two or three people who actually had an interest and would post. Let's see if a general email will spark people to get more involved.

[KLowry@Thomco]

Once again I agree.  There are only 19 registered users on here.  That is not going to make a dent in any kind of collaboration.   There were about 150 at the conference and if we are going to send/email anything it needs to be soon while the conference is still fresh.
I'd certainly be willing to help out if I can so we can get moving on this.

[rmccallum]

Great, If you can come up with a good way to send out the actual email (i.e. without exposing everyones address to the other recipents) I will work on getting the list of users from the aamga. (If I cannot get the list electronically I will type it up using the registration packet). Also I guess we need to decide how the email will read.
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Subject: AAMGA Open source round table discussion followup
This email is being sent to all attendees of the AAMGA automation conference in San Antonio.
This email is to annouce the existence of the InsuranceITPro.com web site and forum that was created in an attempt to form a community of IT people that work in the insurance industry.
http://insuranceitpro.com
If you are interested in becoming a part of this community please create an account on the fourm and introduce yourself.

(opt out message etc. etc.)
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Just a general idea I guess to get the ball rolling.
I am going to try to get the list right now...

[rmccallum]

well could not get in touch over the phone so I sent an email to Marty Bair requesting the email addresses in electronic format.
I will post as soon as I get a response.

[KLowry@Thomco]

To hide them all you have to do is put the in the BCC: field of whatever mailer agent/program is used.  Not that hiding them should be an issue as they were listed in the handout at the conference by name and by company.

If the email list is in electronic format (Excel, etc) it can easily be used as a datasource for a custom mailer.

If you can get the list, email body/text, and a from: and reply-to: email address I could code a quick mail loop in an hour or so.

[KLowry@Thomco]

Actually it didn't take long.  If you can get me a datasource with the names and emails and what you want in the body I'm ready to go.
Also need the reply-to: email address -- maybe the webmaster or something at insuranceitpro.com ?

[rmccallum]

The webmaster address is fine for replies.

draft 2:
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Subject: AAMGA Open source round table discussion followup
This email is being sent to all attendees of the AAMGA automation conference in San Antonio.
This email is to annouce the existence of the InsuranceITPro.com web site and forum that was created in an attempt to form a community of IT people that work in the insurance industry.
If you are interested in becoming a part of this community please create an account on the fourm and introduce yourself.
http://insuranceitpro.com

The site was created in reponse to discussions at the 2005 AAMGA technology conference. A year later at the 2006 conference the general consensus during the "open source round table discussion" was to send out an email to the conference attendees in order to try to get the word out about the forum. This is it.
If you know of others that would be interested in becoming a part of this community please let them know as well.

Your email address was obtained from the AAMGA 2006 Technology Conference attendee list.
We hope to not have to send out any further email but if you wish to be removed from the list of recipents please reply to this message.
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Very open to suggestions on the content of the email.

[rmccallum]

Ok, I have the email list in excel format.
Just need to finalize the text of the email and decide exactly how to send it out.

[KLowry@Thomco]

Are we ready to go on this ?

[rmccallum]

Looks like we are ready to go, I think it would be best to wait until Tuesday to send since Friday is a holiday. Could you send the message to me as a test? My domain is mhi-tx.com address is robert.

[rmccallum]

The email has been sent,
I sent it using ezmlm mailing list manager. It was all done from the insuranceitpro.com site as webmaster. I figured this way anyone who decides to take over administration of this site will have the ability to create lists based on any IT conference that occurs etc.
Hopefully we will get a good response.