“Are you all right sir?” I asked The Effective Detective, alarmed not only by the lack of the smell of coffee permeating the area, but also by the smell that had replaced it: lemon and honey.

“Right as rain Watson,” responded The Detective, just before a spasm of coughs overwhelmed him. “That is if rain occasionally feels simply awful. No matter, the show must go on and all that rot.”

“Quite right sir, just what is the show that is going on today?” I responded not wishing the conversation get bogged down in various disease symptoms.

“End of the year work, Watson, in particular cleaning up lists,” the Detective answered.

“What is the nature of said cleaning sir?” knowing the answer to the question might be somewhat obvious, but the type of lead in the Detective enjoyed.

“Simply put Watson, realizing the reality that we in some way failed to engage a portion of the people who were at one time interested in what we had to say, and removing them from our various lists.  However, rather than just removing them, I have chosen a slightly less aggressive tactic. We will give them one or two chances to restate their interest, but if they choose to ignore these missives as well, then come the first of the year we will follow what seems .”

“What if our messages have just been going to their SPAM folders sir? Won’t this one follow?” I asked intrigued yet worried there would be one more task to do just at the end of an already busy holiday session.

“Ah Watson I am so pleased that your deductions are becoming are and more astute,” answered  the Detective almost challenging me to respond with some sarcasm in return, but I chose to hold my tongue. “We will send our message as plain text rather than HTML. Plain text is hardly perfect but spammers use it less, because they cannot hide their insidious links behind an innocuous hyperlink label so SPAM filters are more likely to pass us through. Of course if they had marked our correspondence as SPAM at some point, well, nothing can be done about that.”

“So what will the content of this message be?” I asked, my fear of more work overcome by my curiosity.

“Merely that we have noticed that they had not opened any messages for at least  6 months, and that if they wish to stay on our list to click the provided link, and if they do not, just do nothing, they will be removed at the beginning of the new year,”  The Detective replied succinctly, then laid back in his chair, my signal to come up with some rejoinder or issue.

“Sir, won’t we be cutting out list size down unnecessarily? Won’t we be decreasing our chances of some positive action to a future offer?” I offered.

“Bah, Watson. If they haven’t been reading anything we have sent for the past 6 months, do you actually believe their eyes will burst open and they will see the light suddenly because of some amazing offer we are sending out? Highly unlikely. More likely, they will tire of seeing our emails at some point, and rather than reading and taking positive action, they will mark as SPAM. Removing them seems to be a far better option.”

“So actually sir, we will have smaller more responsive lists, rather than larger lists that may appeal to our egos but with no real benefit, and possible bad effects vis-a-vis SPAM reports and such!” I exclaimed.

“Quite so Watson, now back to work, or perhaps back to bed for me.”