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.
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  • icon
    brbubba (profile), 17 Feb 2004 @ 6:55pm

    No Subject Given

    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.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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