Text Box: How to Support Emails Brats 1. This is a private site run with private money. The few dollars spent to keep this site running is nothing compared to the pure enjoyment of seeing friends reconnect. 2. Donations are not, and never will be, solicited or accepted. If you have extra money to give, put it in a savings account to pay your way to an SAHS Reunion. 3. But if you want to help, do this: a. Keep your email address current. We hate losing contact with you. b. Get your Brat friends to get listed. c. Snoop around to find addresses for other Brats. d. Enjoy contacting your friends, and don’t use the list for any other purpose. A Brief History of Email Brats This site began as an outgrowth of a listserve address list established by Mr. Michael O’Brien, a now-retired art teacher who taught many years at SAHS. At the time, a listserve was a rather sophisticated method of collecting email addresses and permitting one email to reach many. As the Internet developed, the capabilities of this method of communication became less useful especially as people wished to know who was on the list, and to organize by class years. Sometime around 1995, Keith Hodges ’67 took Mr. O’Brien’s email addresses to produce what you see here. Since that time, the list has grown from several hundred to over 2,000. Establishing the list was only part of the work, the harder work was done by Mr. O’Brien and address list managers who slaved to collect and verify the data. Address list managers – past and present – are: Diane Kneeland '75 Barbara Fairbanks '78 It is also significant to note the important role of the “old” postal list that Joe Holcombe ’67 maintained for many years, by himself, sending out hundreds of letters each year. Before email, Joe was the glue that kept us in contact. When it was decided to put all the contact efforts into email, Joe aggressively sent special mailings to advise those on the postal list to get listed with Email Brats. Why we do not use a listserve .... * Listserves cost money to set up and maintain. * Hard to control who signs up. By the time one knows an interloper is on the list, the damage is done. * On a listserve, one can only send an email to everyone on the list - there is no ability to write just your group of friends. This means a lot of people will get email they don't care about which is tantamount to spam. Spam means important emails will get ignored. * We have had a few times when Brats tried to use the list for commercial purposes. If we had a listserve, we would be begging for that to happen.