Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sei!mrb From: mrb@sei.cmu.edu (Mario Barbacci) Newsgroups: comp.org.ieee Subject: IEEE Computer Society membership drive Keywords: Why you? Message-ID: <3303@ag.sei.cmu.edu> Date: 5 May 89 19:07:10 GMT Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University (Software Engineering Institute), Pgh, PA Lines: 55 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: "Barry W. Johnson" 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mario R. Barbacci, arpanet: mrb@sei.cmu.edu uunet: ...!harvard!sei.cmu.edu!mrb Software Engineering Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh PA 15213, (412) 268-7704