“What can be so difficult about sending out a few e-mails?” Ludwig asks. And it is a fair enough question when one can so easily fire off personal e-mails from one’s own personal computer. But whether one likes it or not, to do anything on a commercial scale is usually much more complex. And it is these sorts of “complications” that start-ups, like our own project, need to appreciate when translating an idea to reality.

And so quite a few things had to be considered before we could send out, this week, e-mails to a few thousand of Economist Group clients from various business units as part of our ongoing search for ideas:

• Clients’ privacy preferences must be respected - a legal requirement. In selecting the e-mail addresses, only clients who had agreed to receiving correspondence from other Economist Group businesses could be contacted.

• An e-mail campaign must include a mechanism for receipt and management of any requests to “unsubscribe” from future e-mail campaigns. Where such a mechanism does not exist one has to be established, and maintained.

• Arranging mailings to “hit” at key times ensures a more successful response rate, and as a result timed e-mail drops need to be established to match different time zones. To send all e-mails out to hit during European business hours would mean all Asian e-mails would arrive at night.

• A standard personal computer system is not powerful enough to send out large quantities of e-mail. They need to be run through larger technical systems, which makes it necessary to source such a system or liaise with others who have access to one.

And then there are umpteen smaller things to consider, such as deciding to send an html or text version of the email, the right timing and, of course, what the most effective copy will be for each target group.

In the past two weeks, I often have found myself explaining to my Project Red Stripe colleagues that any “hold ups” or complications with “sending out an innocent email” to clients is not our old colleagues trying to plot against us and be difficult, but rather “the way business is done”.

There are good and fair reasons underlying most things, but the legalities and technicalities invariably frustrate impatient trail blazers, like ourselves. We can’t change everything to suit our needs. Rather, we need to learn how to make the system work for us.

As Rafat Ali points out in his excellent e-mail newsletter (well it would be woulnd’t it), e-mail’s still got it. You can read his post yourself, but it’s interesting what Jeff DeBalko (ex-eLogic) says in the BtoBOnline article.

In fact, we’ve been unsubscribing (non-)readers (those that don’t open e-mails regularly) at Economist.com for years (which is what Prescott Shibles, VP-online development/new media at Prism Business Media says they do in the article, but a bit more agressively).

I suppose, though, that you need to know what you’re trying to do with your e-mail newsletters in the first place. Economist.com have two types (as do many others) - one that can be read and makes sense by itself with the other encouraging click-throughs to the main site to get the full story.

The first of these could live as a commercial product by itself (with paying advertisers) whilst the second is essentially a traffic-driver or value-add (as with the WSJ alerts). You wouldn’t want to unsubscribe someone from alerts if they are designed to be useful without the need to even open them.

But I guess that’s obvious.