Email

Email

by Mike Masnick


Print



People Know The Difference Between Spam And A Legitimate Newsletter

from the not-so-hard dept

Despite the claims from some who say that email is dead for newsletters, most people have adjusted and are smart enough to recognize the difference between an email newsletter they signed up for and spam. The real issue is that newsletter recipients are a demanding bunch (as they should be!), and have a very "what have you done for me lately?" attitude. Thus, if a newsletter isn't serving their needs, they stop reading it. For many people, simply designating a newsletter as spam and letting the filter handle the rest is much easier than the unsubscribe process that many newsletters require you to go through. The collateral damage on this is that many spam filters that take user inputs in deciding what's spam, end up declaring legitimate newsletters as spam for other users, because some felt it lost its usefulness. In other words, it's not that people are getting confused and think that legitimate newsletters are spam. It's just that the newsletters stopped being useful and the spam filter provided an easier "unsubscribe" process.

1 Comment | Leave a Comment..

 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1. No Subject Given

    by brbubba - Feb 17th, 2004 @ 6:55pm

    Yeah this has been a problem for a while now, ever since Cloudmark was back in original beta. I tested it out and my legitimate mailing lists would be flagged as SPAM. No matter how many times I told them it wasn't SPAM, it would still flag them.
    Don't know why it has taken them so long to realize that in fact, not everyone can agree on what is and what is not SPAM.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

Add Your Comment

Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie
  • Plain Text: A CRLF will be replaced by break <br> tag, all other allowable HTML is intact
  • HTML: No formatting of any kind is done without explicitly being written in
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <p> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>
Close
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie
Search Techdirt
And now, a word from our Sponsors..
Subscribe to Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Related Stories
Close
E-mail It