🚀 go-pugleaf

Eric Johnson posted a message complaining about receiving an invitation to
join the computer society even though he is already a member.

I forwarded Eric Johnson's meesage to Barry Johnson, the Computer Society VP
for membership and this is Barry's reply to me (posted with his permision).
Barry is replying to Eric directly.


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From:    "Barry W. Johnson" <bwj@eesun6.ee.virginia.edu>
To:      mrb@sei.cmu.edu
Date:    Fri, 5 May 89 12:01:39 EDT
Subject: Re:  Computer Society recruiting campaigns

Mario,

We do cross reference the membership lists!!  Before we do a mailing we do
what's called a "merge/purge" that is intended to prevent exactly what Eric
is talking about.  I am not sure why his name fell through the cracks!  We
have always been very sensitive about people getting letters if they are
already members or of people getting multiple letters because they show up
on more than one of our lists.  We put A LOT of effort into this aspect of
the promotion process. I apologize to Eric for any inconvenience !!

Thanks,
Barry
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I would like to add a personal note. One of the reasons duplicate mailings
happen is because people use different mailing addresses for different
magazines (or profesional societies). I know folks that use their home
address for some Computer Society subscriptions and their work address for
other CS things (the CS staff hate this but are too polite to say anything).
Sometimes it is something trivial like using/dropping a middle initial. The
technology for discovering mailing lists duplicates is not very
sophisticated -- "string matching" is about it :-) and screwups are bound to
happen. 

I sometimes do this on purpose, I use various middle initials to track down
the origins of unsolicited mail -- try it sometime...  it is amazing how
quickly these lists spread around.

I too get ocassional  invitations to join the Computer Society but I don't
get angry, instead I pass them along to people who might be interested in
joining. I suggest we should all do the same.

Mario Barbacci
Board of Governors
IEEE Computer Society
-- 
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Mario R. Barbacci,
arpanet: mrb@sei.cmu.edu		uunet: ...!harvard!sei.cmu.edu!mrb
Software Engineering Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh PA 15213, (412) 268-7704