Useless emails in email blast

All Things Chess
1

I wanted to give a heads up to others who purchase email blasts from USCF that there are tens of thousands of “dormant” accounts in the email function. You can save a fair bit of money by avoiding them.

The description states that it finds all US Chess members that meet the selected criteria. That’s misleading because it includes expired memberships. Not just recently expired ones, but ones that expired years (sometimes many years) in the past.

Case in point. A nationwise search for all emails returns 48,069 records.

If I exclude all expired memberships by looking only at memberships that expire between today and Dec 31, 2100 (almost 75 years from now), the search drops to 10,068 records. Since lifetime memberships are listed as Dec 31, 2099, this suggests that nearly 35,000 of the records are expired memberships (or perhaps have no membership at all).

Of course many of these records are for recently expired memberships. Let’s go back a year to Sept 2, 2025. The # of emails jumps to 13,922.

September 2, 2024? 18017 records.

2023? 20,333 records. 2016? 38,465. We’re ten years expired at this point and we still haven’t encountered 8,000 records.

I’ve started making a point of excluding records that expired more than 6-12 months in the past depending on the nature of the blast. It’s saving a fair bit of money (usually 25-50%) each time.

If I’m missing anything in this, let me know. Otherwise, it seems like kind of a sneaky way of USCF making extra bucks by selling emails to accounts which will have an extremely low rate of converting into sales, registrations, etc.

2

The first of the ten search options is age and the second one is membership expiration date. It is not a hidden option.

Did you want “Search for US Chess members” changed to “Search for US Chess member records”? It sounds a bit stilted and (over the decades at work before I retired) when I’ve made such clarifications I’ve been asked to go with simpler and less exacting language.

3

You should note that not all life memberships are set with a 12/31/2099 membership expiration date. For example my own record as a life member, https://ratings.uschess.org/player/12774242, appears to be set with a membership expiration date of 3/31/2222.

Based on the criteria you outlined in your post, I’m not certain that I or some other life members would appear on your list.

4

Of the roughly 7750 active life members, about 7170 have an expiration date in 2099, the rest have expiration dates after that.

Prior to 2004, a life member was given an expiration date of 99/99/99. However, when we moved to a relational database that had to change as it was not a valid date.

So, we changed it to 12/31/2099.

When the membership system was redone in 2020, there was some concern that new younger life members might actually live past 2099, so what we started doing was adding 200 years to the current date.

So, there is no one expiration date that says ‘this is a life member’, but there are membership codes to handle that.

I’ve passed the issue of good practices for selecting members for an email blast on to the membership department, because I do not handle email blasts.