SFG event notifications: Do you really need you need to sign your partners up for them?

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We had an issue not too long ago, where an SFG administrator for a new SFG customer was in the process of setting up SFG, and decided to sign every single SFG partner up for a particular set of email notifications. There were four or five event codes involved. It was done  without first consulting some of the "shareholders" in the situation. In this case, it caused him some unanticipated issues.

I have talked to a number of people over the past five years or so, who have been added to a commercial email list without intending to have that happen. I have also had that happen to me. I found it pretty annoying to get emails from a place I did not want them from. I have also seen and heard of cases where the senders of such emails do not exactly make it easy to find instructions on how to stop receiving them. Keeping in mind such things if this has happened to you, before you think about proactively signing up your SFG partners for event notifications, please consider a few things:

* People are usually happier if you offer them something than if you force it on them "for their own good".

* If you let your partners know that event notifications are available, they are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves if they want and need them. They are also perfectly capable of signing themselves up if given instructions.

* You are probably going to significantly increase the volume of email they receive. That is particularly true if you sign them up for something that is not an error, for example, code FG_0419 "Delivery Complete", or if they are a high volume trading partner.

* It is likely that at least some of your partners will already have their own monitoring methods and neither want, nor need event notification emails.

* If you have, for example, 10,000 partners, and you sign them all up for five event notifications each, you could really slow down the processing and sending of event notifications for the people that consider them important or even vital.

* If you have a subset of partners that you come to believe should be required to receive event notifications, there is no reason why you could not proactively set them up for just that set of partners. It is unlikely to be a large list.

* You could cause a volume increase on the mail server, that the administrator of that server is not anticipating, or even worse, that the mail server cannot handle.

These are just some examples of why I think it is best to let your partners decide if they want event notifications rather than deciding for them.