A Newsletter from Hell?

Several of our monthly newsletter readers noticed that our July 2018 edition was delivered to them from a unique SWAT email address. The email address that raised eyebrows? hell@swatsystems.com.

“We’re you hacked? Is this a phishing scam? Did a disgruntled employee sabotage your newsletter?”

No, no, and no. While the process of creating quality content for our readers can sometimes be described as “Hell” by a certain marketing employee (*ahem*), this little incident was a result of a simple typo.

A Hello Gone Bad

Our email marketing software was originally configured to send emails from “marketing@swatsystems.com.” To me, emails from that account felt like we were sending our readers “SWAT coupons, promotions, and deals!” It was too sales-y when, in fact, we wanted to connect with our readers through knowledge articles, FYIs, events, and posts of life at our office.

The scene of the incident - a settings window in our newsletter software

I made the decision to start sending emails from “hello@swatsystems.com.” It aligned perfectly with our newsletter goals. Our newsletter is a representation of SWAT Systems visiting your inbox every month to say “Hello!” We can catch up on life, chat about tech, and invite you to our upcoming get-together!

The one thing I never did, however, was change our default email address in our newsletter software. Every month, I manually override the newsletter’s settings to show that the email came from “The Geeks from SWAT Systems” and “hello@swatsystems.com.” As you have probably already figured out, my fingers didn’t reach the o in hello.

The face I made for 24 hours after the newsletter was sent.

Darn it. I send out several test emails before we hit send. We click on every link, we check every design, we preview it on smartphones and tablets. Our brain was just used to seeing hello@swatsystems.com so often, it filled in the “o” without notifying us. Very smart and efficient.

In a nutshell, a silly human mistake caused our newsletter to send from our underground post office. A big thank you to those who laughed and smiled as you made us aware of our typo. Coincidentally, Seattle was experiencing a hot summer week when our July newsletter went out. Maybe it was meant to be!