Angel's Lair EMail List

Jim Engel

About twenty years ago, not too long after the advent of the internet, I fell into the habit of sending more or less regular messages to working dog friends on my personal EMail account, mostly those involved in North American Bouvier des Flandres affairs. As time went on and my circle expanded Europeans were included and as the list evolved those with publically available addresses were also included, generally from the various canine web sites. Eventually this became more formalized as Angel's Lair, "engel" being the German word for angel.

The mechanics of sending large numbers of messages becomes complex as too many too fast tends to trigger limits established by the internet service provider, eventually causing the account to be suspended. Since a search for commercial batch mailing software yielded nothing satisfactory I set about creating my own, based on programs going back to before the personal computer era, originally created for maintaining club rosters and printing mailing labels. (Fortran on a SDS time sharing system, if you can believe it!) This software sends out multiple messages separated by a few seconds in time with multiple BCC recipients, generally about 30. In this way several thousand messages can be sent over a few minutes without exceeding the traffic limits and attracting the attention of the provider admin people.

Currently the list is approaching twelve thousand entries, although many lack any Email address, mostly for historical reasons from the pre internet days when the primary purpose was to print mailing labels. As time went on software evolved to harvest Email addresses from web sites, which has become much more complex and sophisticated as time has gone on and experience expanded.

A relatively small number of the non-soliciting recipients elect to opt out by contacting me with an Email message. A problem early on was that with thousands in the expanding list those who had opted out tended to be later picked up again; it turns out that avoiding this is complex in operational terms and took some serious development to automate the process. But these problems have been mostly worked out and currently those on the opt out list are pretty much permanently left alone, since annoying people serves no purpose.

This opt out list is small, less than a couple hundred after some two decades. One of the things I learned in my Dog Sports days, from editor Mike McKown, is that in this business there is essentially no such thing as bad publicity, offended and angry people often can not quite let loose, seem to on some level enjoy wallowing in righteous indignation.

The dog world, in Europe as well as America, in working circles as well as the bait and gait show world, tends to be run by establishment people, tight little self-perpetuating cabals with disdain for the rank and file and their own interests and agendas. These insiders include club officers, judges of various sorts and other powerful and influential people that ordinary folk cannot really address openly for fear, realistic in many contexts, of retribution down the road.

Thus one of the primary functions of my web articles and the Email list has been to provide the opportunity to those in high places, such as the SV, for a straight from the shoulder understanding of what is on the mind of the rank and file, what they would say if they felt they could say it.

The working dog world is very complex and convoluted, and many of the list messages of necessity assume a certain amount of familiarity with the terminology and issues. The references below have been selected to present a decent entry level explanation of the complexities, and can serve as a reference to terminology.

Angel's Lair EMail List

Jim Engel

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