THE SPAM WARS
I have been writing about the Spam Wars for more than two years now. Once, I had even predicted that the Spam Wars could lead to the death of email marketing. I hate being so negative, but the trends have shown many members of that anti-spam community to be blind to justice.
With the widespread implementations of blacklisting and filtering, the chances of an ezine of reaching its intended recipients is greatly dimished.
The person who has subscribed to an ezine very likely requested the subscription themselves, and in most cases, they verified their intent to receive the publication (double opt-in).
It is a fact that a person could verify his intent to subscribe to a publication two dozen times, and still the ezine they had subscribed to could be blocked from ever reaching their mailbox. That is the nature of blacklisting and spam filtering --- neither one cares if a person has requested to receive an email or if a current relationship exists between the sender and recipient. Both the blacklister and the spam filter will arbitrarily block a message from reaching its intended recipient based on a certain criteria defined by some system administrator sitting behind a keyboard somwhere else on the planet.
SPAM NASTY ENVIRONMENT
In this spam nasty environment, there are the spammers on one side of the isle, and the anti-spammers on the other side of the isle. Stuck in the middle are the ezine publishers who abide by all rules and guidelines for proper email publishing.
Some anti-spammers deliberately target ezines because the ezine publishers represent commercial interests.
Some people even use the anti-spam hysteria to settle personal beefs with others and also to attack those with whom they disagree.
IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS
Please note the adjective in use here, "some." This is an important distinction as others in the anti-spam community are folks like you and I, who are simply frustated with the level of email aimed to our mailboxes for the purpose of selling us access to p*rn or body enhancement products.
There is no doubt as to the existence of a problem each time I open my email software. Yet, it has always been my argument that some of the spam solutions are worse than the spam situation they seek to solve.
A solution is not a good solution if it "throws the baby out with the bath water." Some in the anti-spam community believe that it is okay to sacrifice tens of thousand babies in order to empty a couple tubs of water.
My answer, "two wrong's don't make a right."
THE BATTLE FOR THE MIGHTY DOLLAR
Other commercial enterprises have arisen that purport to be possible solutions to the spam problem.
Whitelisting is a fairly recent entrant into the anti-spam enterprises. And yet, other anti-spammers think that even the whitelisting companies are an evil to be squashed. Of course, their reasons for despising the whitelisting companies are different from mine.
The anti-spammers who hate whitelisting generally hate it because corporations and others with deep pockets are being permitted to buy a pass to send unsolicited commercial email.
I am a person who is publishes an ezine and I offers support services to other ezine publishers. The people with whom I work are those who are publishing their ezines the right way, by making sure that all of their subscribers are double opt-in subscribers.
I find paid whitelisting offensive because the publishers who are using double and triple opt-in are being told that the only way they can assure delivery of their ezine is to pay some third-party company an extortion fee to get their ezines to the people who have subscribed to their publication. This applies not only to people who offer free ezines --- it also applies to publishers who offer paid subscription ezines.
You would think that if a subscriber has paid to receive the ezine, then that should indicate a serious intent by the subscriber to receive the publication in question.
Some are making a ton of money in the attempt to limit spam email. Yet many of their systems are so flawed that requested ezines cannot reach their intended recipients, paid subscribers cannot get the email they have paid to receive, and worse, people who have an existing business relationship don't always get their communications through to their business contacts --- sometimes ending up angry customers and in lost business.
Some of the blind to justice anti-spammers will read this and snicker, "Darn shame." What does that say about them?
TWISTED PERCEPTIONS
Although "some" anti-spammers have tried to twist the perception of my Spam Wars commentaries into a pro-spam ideology, they have never been right in doing so. I do not support spam, and I find the hundreds of p*rn advertisements to be something I do not want in my email box. I also do not want to learn how I can grow my phallic unit or my breasts to unnatural sizes.
Instead, my argument has always been that there absolutely has to be a better way to stop spam. I think highly upon the skills of the programmers who have brought us this wonderful world of the Internet. I just wish someone could come up with a better solution to combat spam --- a solution that does not penalize those who run their commercial online enterprises with the highest integrity.
FINALLY, SOMETHING TO BE EXCITED ABOUT
After all of these years, someone has granted to me my wish. Would you be at all surprised if I told you that for the first time in years, I am very excited about ezine publishing again?
Someone has brought a number of existing technologies into an umbrella operation which uses "pull technology" rather than "push technology."
PUSH AND PULL TECHNOLOGY
Email is a "push technology".
Quikonnex is a "pull technology."
Through the Quikonnex system, you can subscribe to certain "channels", kind of like channels on your television. "Channeling" (pull technology) allows the subscriber to receive materials in straight text, full html, voice, video, or interactive media.
Subscribers are notified directly --- desktop to desktop --- when new materials are ready. Notification comes through the Awasu software, which is an RSS reader, and utilizes a technology very similar to the Yahoo! or AOL IM.
Within the Quikonnex system, subscribers do not pay to use the software or to receive information. Publishers do pay to use the service, but compared to other distribution systems, the cost to operate up to 100 channels is dirt cheap at $19.95 per month, and it is all spam-free.
Copyright Bill Platt - All Rights Reserved. Reprints allowed with article and resource box unedited. If you post this article on a website, you must set the links up as hyperlinks.
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