'From' Field: Have We Met?

The City University of New York’s (CUNY) Graduate Center often has very good lectures that are open to the public. Buy tickets online and unsurprisingly, you wind up on their e-mail list.

Unfortunately for this non-profit, the mailings that don’t wind up in the spam folder often tend to get spiked into the trash, and for no other reason than the ‘from’ field contains the oblique name “Science & the Arts.”

Nary a trace of CUNY, not even in the full address, which comes from PatronMail‘s equally opaque domain: pmailus.com.

This may fly with CUNY-centric students and faculty members, but the university’s goal is to get paying members of the general public into their talks. As a New Yorker, I tend to think of CUNY as CUNY — there are more than enough science and arts institutions to go around.

Reminds me of a service provider I formerly worked with. His company had a name, but his e-mails all came from “Steve.”

That’s another instance of too common, too vague, and too spammy-sounding a ‘from’ field.’ Above all, what these ‘from’ fields realy have in common is they reflect how the senders think about themselves, not about how clients and prospects think about them.