Wela's Blog

What is your practice when you reply an email? I’m sure your answer would be Click REPLY and type and send away. Have you seen replies without the original mail contents … I get these all the time.

Most cases University students reply mails without the original mail. the reply comes to my inbox as a new mail and I have no way of relating to the original mail. I think to save bandwidth or something they just delete the original body contents. I just have received about 10 replies from 10 people to an email which I sent yesterday and now I have to open and compare which one is which as each of these mails had personalized contents. … you know what… I’m just going to ignore them all … even though these mails are important. no time to waste

Put this in a context where I deal with couple of hundred emails every day. It’s time wasting. So folks … for god sake please make sure to KEEP the original mail contents when you reply.

The first thing that comes to your mind is … oh! damn! those spammers. This morning I just deleted about 400 emails from couple of my inboxes from various email marketing companies. Among them Sri Lankan Advertising,  SriMails.com,  eVision Advertising, CP Promotions, 4th Dimnsion tops the list by sending the most number of emails .. or more SPAM!

I was just annoyed and called some of them and also called the companies they are sending emails on behalf of. Comic Classics! Their customers have no clue about what’s the problem or purposely neglecting with excuses. Some even had balls to say we have outsourced it to our media agency and cant take responsibility on whom they are sending the mails to. Now! what kind of an irresponsible answer it that. As per my knowledge they are equally responsible as the party who are sending the emails. Sad part is they put all these effort to create the emails and they have no clue of to whom they are sending to … just sending out … in other words that sounds like they have no damn clue about their own business. For an example … so called Training Sri Lanka Newsletter have no clue of who they want to reach or train.

Out of the above mentioned companies it seems like nobody had a clue of what they are doing, or no knowledge about the correct process, or the worst case purposely ignoring the situation to make a quick buck out of it. One of them mentioned that they know about the issue but cant stop because it’s a good income source. When I questioned about how the mail addresses were collected (because I never subscribed to) the answer was they have an option to enter the mail address on their site, and anybody can go and enter any email address. How would I know they themselves didn’t enter my email? Rest of the answered were just useless.

Anyways … the way I see it … the end is near. Email campaigns done in the right way can be a very effective marketing tool. But when keep spamming people like this without analyzing the customer preferences it just becomes useless. Right now hotmail and live have already recognized some of them as spammers. and for sure many administrators have blocked these from receiving mails to their networks … and within couple of more months their headless customers also will realize that there is no value in sending emails. For an example SriMails market themselves as they have a database with over 200000 addresses … what's the point if 90% of them are blocked by servers, firewalls and many more receivers just delete these mails and only like 20 of these receivers actually reads these emails. I’m sure most of them don’t have a good tool to track how many emails were received, read etc, or don’t provide a report to the customer.

Something that could have been a good ethical marketing channel have already been spoiled by few companies who call themselves innovators, or first to do e-marketing in the country bla bla … too bad! Even though two of the above listed companies agreed to remove my mail addresses that’s not going to solve the problem at large.

Couple of years ago I also have sent email campaigns for several of my foreign customers, but only to mailing lists where receivers have subscribed. Not just bunches of collected emails.

I’m 100% supportive to any startup company who do business in a professional manner. But people who break all the rules and annoy me … I’ll wait for the next mail from any of you

Click here to download the Sinhala Windows 7 LIP via the Microsoft.com Download Center.

Please note that the Sinhala  Windows 7 LIP can only be installed on a system that runs an English client version of Windows 7.  It is available to download for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Localization was done by Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA)  (Translation and Linguistic Moderation), and Lionbridge (Strategic Engineering Partner). 

Facts about the language:

• Sinhala contains loan words of Portuguese, Dutch and English origin, which reflects Sri Lanka's colonial history. English was official language from 1833 to 1958 (that is until 10 years after independence).
• There is a crucial distinction between "high" and "low" Sinhala: The colloquial form used in everyday life is quite different from the literary form which is also spoken in formal environments and in the media. The differences are so big that the two forms could be considered two different languages. Not only is the vocabulary very distinct, but also the grammar: In the colloquial version there are no inflected forms for verbs, for example. This is a little like having King Edward's English used on MSNBC and slang in everyday conversations.
• There are no sub-clauses - comparable constructions are created with participles and adjectives. Therefore a phrase like "The man who gives information on LIP languages" becomes "The information on LIP languages giving man".
• There are no prepositions but only postpositions. "under the book" would literally retranslate as "book under".

Classification:

Sinhala is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is most closely related to Dhivehi, which is spoken on the Maledives.

Click here for more information on the Sinhala language.