iPressRelease

Through a series of unfortunate events (mostly involving my having to send more press releases than usual on account of Universal duties and finding out that my @#&$#@ing web server doesn't allow me to send over 250 e mails per day), I came across the very easy to use and generally life-saving iContact.

iContact is lovely because you can actually see which journalists have received and opened your releases ((BIG BROTHER)), a feature that is useful for two reasons: 1. If certain journalists are never opening your e mails (perhaps because they aren't writing about classical music anymore or perhaps because they're just not that into you), you can remove them from your list and stop bothering them in the future. 2. In this SPAMtastic time, it's great to be able to see which e mails are bouncing in a clear list format, rather than becoming the proud recipient of 30 nefarious MAILER-DAEMON auto-responses. (MARK SWED IS WRITING TO ME!!! Oh wait, it's just the Mailer-Daemon.)

You can also hyperlink to music and video clips without knowing HTML (Music samples in a music press release?? Brave new world...), and link to an e mail address with the auto subject of your choice. So the Netrebko press release I just sent into the ether will come back with the e mail subject "Souvenirs request", for example, which helps to keep life organized.

The system has both designed and simple text formats, so your beautiful press release won't turn into a big fat mess should a recipient not work in HTML. Here's how the release looks all designed-like:

And now the simple text version: