{"id":178,"date":"2001-12-25T00:02:59","date_gmt":"2001-12-25T00:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/?p=178"},"modified":"2001-12-25T00:02:59","modified_gmt":"2001-12-25T00:02:59","slug":"20011225","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/2001\/12\/25\/20011225\/","title":{"rendered":"2001\/12\/25"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><P>This site is supposed to be&nbsp;about software management<EM>.<\/EM>&nbsp;But sometimes you don&#8217;t have the power to create change in your organization by executive fiat. Obviously, if you&#8217;re just a grunt programmer at the bottom of the totem pole, you can&#8217;t exactly order people to start creating schedules&nbsp;or bug databases. And in fact even if you&#8217;re a manager, you&#8217;ve probably discovered that managing developers is a lot like herding cats, only not as fun. Merely saying &#8220;make it so&#8221; doesn&#8217;t make it so.<\/P> <P><A href=\"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/articles\/fog0000000332.html\">Getting Things Done When You&#8217;re Only a Grunt<\/A><\/P> <P><STRONG>WhatCounts Replaces Mailman<\/STRONG><\/P> <P>I used to use <A href=\"http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/software\/mailman\/mailman.html\">mailman<\/A>&nbsp;to send the notification email to the 7568 subscribers who&nbsp;signed up. It had some problems. The biggest one was that every email that went out had to be exactly the same, and there was no way to include a recipient&#8217;s email address in the text of the outgoing message. This made it a pain to unsubscribe people who didn&#8217;t quite know why they were subscribed (usually they had an old email address forwarding to their current address). In fact I&#8217;m embarassed to admit that under the old system the only way to unsubscribe people was for me to go through all the unsubscribe messages and remove people manually. Why I put up with this for so long is completely beyond me.<\/P> <P><A href=\"http:\/\/www.whatcounts.com\"><IMG data-recalc-dims=\"1\" height=\"56\" alt=WhatCounts hspace=4 src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2001\/12\/whatcounts.gif?resize=80%2C56&#038;ssl=1\" width=\"80\" align=right border=0><\/A>Thanks to David Geller at <A href=\"http:\/\/www.whatcounts.com\">WhatCounts<\/A>, I have a new system to manage the notification&nbsp;email. Every outgoing message will automatically have a custom return address on the WhatCounts server and a custom link you can click to unsubscribe. I hope this will make list management, finally, a totally painless process. The only problem with the new system is that if you receive one of my notifications and reply to it, I never see the reply. WhatCounts will assume it&#8217;s a bounce or an unsubscribe request and deal with it appropriately. If you want to contact me you have to <A href=\"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/navLinks\/fog0000000263.html\">send email<\/A>, rather than just replying to the message.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This site is supposed to be&nbsp;about software management.&nbsp;But sometimes you don&#8217;t have the power to create change in your organization by executive fiat. Obviously, if you&#8217;re just&hellip; <span class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/2001\/12\/25\/20011225\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;2001\/12\/25&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s83KNI-20011225","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}