Communicating with reviewers

I sent the email out to many people ask­ing them to be review­ers for the con­fer­ence; it’s touch­ing how many people are pleased to be asked, and pleased to review, each year. It’s not a lot of work, and gives people a chance to see what’s hap­pen­ing and what oth­ers think is import­ant enough to want to talk about, which is enough for some people, but many do it to help. This sense of com­munity is what makes chair­ing a con­fer­ence like XML 2004 worthwhile.

The biggest prob­lem with send­ing out these emails is the side-effects of spam fil­ter­ing. I use Pegas­us as my email tool (in part because it’s vir­us-free, in part because it suits the way I work). It has a fea­ture called dis­tri­bu­tion lists which let me send emails to 100+ people without let­ting all of them see who is on the mail­ing list. Some spam fil­ters, unfor­tu­nately, block all email that isn’t dir­ectly addressed to the recip­i­ent. This often blocks my emails as well for those people who haven’t put my email address in a white list. I won­der if the people who estim­ate the mon­et­ary dam­age caused by spam also include this sort of side-effect?