E-mail Newsletters Switching To RSS

prostoalex writes "The wide spread of unsolicited e-mails is leading publishers and site owners towards subscription-based RSS, the InternetNews.com article says. Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome is quoted saying that people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer. This short article on About.com also argues for the RSS as preferred format for newsletters, site headlines and all sorts of updates that were e-mailed to customers before."

Somewhat good.

I run a newletter for a LAN Party out of Cleveland, and have already adopted this method.

The only good thing that I can say will come from this is the fact that it will be much easier to distinguish spam from newsletters - however, this is a temporary solution, because the Spammers will easily have enough resources to learn how to generate false reports.

Also, it's going to be tough to get everybody to switch to it, and it still won't fix the spam problem.

But anything that tries to put a stop to Spam is ok, as long as it's not rampant blacklisting.

Sigh

Well, I can tell you from personal experience that the LockerGnome folks are not a good resource for telling you what works and what doesn't.

When I first complained that SpamAssassin blocked their newsletter, and merely asked if they could look into it, I was laughed at, and they tried to convince me that I needed to whitelist them or, in their words, "...learn how to use your spam blocking software".

Ironically, months later, they signed up for Habeas signatures [habeas.com] on their emails.

It's interesting that NOW they decide to look into RSS as a solution. I wonder if it is because Habeas isn't working.

Is this it?

Is this what we are forced to do from now on?

hmm

I was under the impression RSS was a pull mechanism, not a subscription mechanism.

Re: Conditional Gets save bandwidth

Most RSS readers support HTTP's Conditional GET mechanism, which only downloads the full file if the modified date in the header is different than your last version. This means you can check for updates with tiny (~200byte) requests. For more info, see HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers [pastiche.org].

Re:hmm

For our mailing lists that go out on a more regular basis, we see bounce rates below 1%. RSS doesn't offer anything except more effort for the user.

Re:hmm

How many of those mailings get eaten by spam filters? How many people don't sign up because they're worried about their email address being sold?

The other difference

...is in who is static and vulnerable, and who is ephemeral and concealed. Spam is push so the user is the one at a disadvantage. RSS spam is pull - it would be trivial to DDOS the (immobile) source into a smoking blob of molten electronics. I can see no future for nonconsensual spammers in RSS.

On the other hand, there is a real future in RSS for genuine advertisers selling desirable product. People like informative, relevant, targetted adverts, especially in pull media (thus not having to put up with intrusive marketing databases). After all, what else is the typical opensource app's web site but informative, useful brochureware?

Re:hmm

RSS = Really Simple Syndication (or some variation of that)

What is syndication, but a "subscription" to something that is available to the public (or a limited subset thereof)? Pull or push (as in email) mechanism, doesn't really matter.

Re:hmm

"Publish" by presenting a publicly accessible RSS feed
"Subscribe" by using an aggregator program or something else that polls that RSS feed

I personally keep up with /. by using the RSS plugin for Trillian, and usually tend to look only at stories that look interesting from the titles that are displayed in its main window. How is that having "to pull a stack of books off the shelf just to read the last page"? If I see a link to a story that looks interesting, I can go straight to it, or I can go to the /. home page and look through everything.

Matters a lot.

There is a big difference.

For example a web page is "pull" meaning that you have to request it in order to have it. You know the address of the server you request info from.

An email is "push" because anyone can send you email if they know your address.

Pull is better in the sense that it permits you to only accept communication from the publishers you selected. You could do the same for email and only accept mail from ppl and publishers in your address book for example but in some case you do want "unkowns" to contact you. Whereas you positively dont want "unknowns" to contact you regarding "newsletters" and such.

You might say then that we would be better off then reading the "newsletter" (or whatever) off the publishers web site. The thing is that RSS enables you to aggregate all those items from different sources together as opposed to going to all the websites.

I gave up mail lists for forums

I used to subscribe to a few mail lists. But I've found online forums to be vastly supperior. I don't get spam, on busy forums I get responces almost immediately. The moderators do a great job sorting misplaced posts and dealing with trolls. And there is a nice archive of everything stored on the server. I don't care how much they clean up email I won't be switching back for these types of things.

Re:I gave up mail lists for forums

I personally can't stand web forums and that ubiquitous UBB. The interface is shite, and a poor replacement for NNTP. It's all about control and things like integrating advertising. Groups.google.com is far more production for searhing discussions than trying to go through those horrible web boards on www.google.com. A lot of the free software and GNU web boards have by far the worst interface too, and are even harder to follow threads on. Furthermore, I like having one consistent and well performing interface (either my email or news client) than having to deal with tonnes of horrendous web sites.

Just say no to web boards and use a moderated mailing list or Usenet group. Actually, I don't see much spam on my ISPs news server, so they must do a good job filtering - completion on the text groups is good too (no idea about binaries).

Re:I gave up mail lists for forums

It's slow. The UI is ugly. It depends on my browser. It's inefficient compared with my NNTP client. It's not even as functional as my NNTP client was 10 years ago. Web site owners have a tendency to use colours and graphics that irritate me - it irritates me further enabling and disabling features of my browser to use a web site. Searches are crap - they're slow, often return useless result, that's what google's for. Icons and emoticons are too easy to use and so people use them all over the place - grrr. Quoting and replying is like pulling teeth. Reoriding the view, kill files rules, etc are slow or just plain pathetic. NNTP clients exist for a reason... trying to get a browser to do the same job is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The definition of ironic

I personally can't stand web forums...

Posted to slashdot

Amphetadesk

I've found it a great way to keep track of all the RSS feeds out there. It's been stable for a while, but a good /.ing might spur them to add some new features ;)

Here's the home page : amphetadesk [disobey.com]

Newsgroups

Why do the publishers just not do something like a moderated newsgroup on a restricted server? It seems like that would provide a better solution and the end user tools are already out there (apparently in better forms than what the article describes the RSS tools of being).

No content, but wants control

We have some opt-in lists that people are signing up for in the thousands. The smallest list has 6,000 subs, the largest 1.7 million. We get 20-55% open rates on a mailing (who knows how many are opening it as ASCII or using something like Mozilla that can block IMG tags in email) depending on the list. If they're only getting 5% open rates, they're probably not sending anything worthwhile.

As for RSS, what are they proposing? Will they have a web site that aggragates for us? No thanks - I don't want to see unrelated advertising, nor do I want to have to put up with their quirks or have their layout and styling applied to everything I subscribe to. Netscape tried this with their portal, and I didn't find it very compelling. Alternatively, are they going to make us install a client application that aggragates? That will face some resistance too, as well as the normal platform specific issues. MSFT tried this with IE4 - it was gone by IE5. I guess not enough people signed up to the channels.

I think email is still the best medium, and will remain so for many years. Portals are dead, and that's all an online RSS aggregator will be.

Re:No content, but wants control

Who are "we?"

I've seen some of the opt-in lists. I've been on a few, despite not having opted in.

If you tell me that there are 1.7 million people in the entire world willing to be put on an opt-in advertising list, I call bullshit. The "Opt-in" lists as they exist now get subscribers by surreptitiousness (putting the "you will be added" on page 43 of a contest agreement form), deceit ("By not failing to have clicked in the position indicated, you are agreeing to not rescind the option to be excluded from..."), and flat out fraud (adding people who didn't ask for it, and claiming they did).

That's how opt-in lists work. If you've got 1.7 million people on one list, then that's how you work, and that makes you a spammer.

damn spammers ruining everything

This is another example of how spammers have infringed on everyone. The threat of spam is causing more and more people to change their habits. Sure you can come up with a new way to do newsgroups, but you and I shouldn't have to adjust to the assholes that are swamping the internet with untold billions of mass e-mailings. As far as I'm concerned, there shouldn't even be a need for a spam filter, much less the extreme caution we have to exercise in our online activities to avoid spammers' getting our e-mails. Spam is a social problem, but it requires a technical fix, because the internet is worldwide while the sovereingty of our own laws stay within our own borders. There should be a way to keep people from faking headers, and bulk e-mailing to thousands of addresses at a time. If I went and dumped one billion pieces of junk mail into the mail box at the post office, intervention by the post office keeps it from automatically sending that junk mail from going to every person out there--they would just trash it and probably come arrest or fine me. That is intelligent intervention on the front side, instead of filtering on the back side.

Re:damn spammers ruining everything

If I went and dumped one billion pieces of junk mail into the mail box at the post office, intervention by the post office keeps it from automatically sending that junk mail from going to every person out there--they would just trash it and probably come arrest or fine me.

Actually, the post office would happily collect your $370 million in postage (minus whatever the bulk mail discount is) and send the letters to their destination. The only thing that keeps postal junk mail in check is that the sender pays, unlike spam where the recipient pays.

How many people actually use RSS Aggregators?

Seriously. One of the reasons that mailing lists and news letters were so widespread is that everyone had a mail reader. We're looking at the same problems right now with revising SMTP and rolling over to IPv6: it's simply impossible to move over such a large number of people to a new technology when there's already one in place that works (even if it doesn't work all that well). Sure, you're going to have a few early adopters, but beyond that it's probably going to stay pretty much the same.

How does RSS scale?

From what little I know about RSS, it's some form of XML format for content, usually served in a pull oriented fashion (as oposed to email's push method). The advantages related to spam avoidance are obvious, since users don't need to give out their address.

However, I do question the ability of RSS to scale. Think of a scenario where millions of users need to poll hundreds of thousands of sources to check for updates on the feeds. How much unnecessary load does this pose to the network and servers? Is RSS really the best way to do it? Wouldn't we be better off with web based forums, or moderated usenet newsgroups? Or yet, extending email with the concept of task-oriented e-mail addresses -- which accept content coming from a defined set of servers only?

In principle, push methods seem a lot more efficient for this kind of content distribution.

There is no push

People have been talking about "push" for a number of years but when you actually look at most of the technologies they're really polling based. Client side e-mail is polling based (POP, IMAP) so what's the difference between polling e-mail servers and polling RSS servers?

RSS must put a lot less load on the network than me checking out the CNN web page 2 or 3 times a day to see what's going on.

Realization at last?

Perhaps, in RSS, we are finally finding realization of all of that "push" hype put forth long ago?

Re:Realization at last?

The whole point of RSS is that, unlike email, it is not push.

In fact, "push" vs "pull" is not very descriptive. You have a newsletter, a publisher who controls the content, and subscribers who read it. There is only one important question: where is the subscription recorded?

There are effectively three models:

1. The subscription is recorded in the subscriber's brain. The subscriber has to make a point of going after the content. This is the model for web pages. I am "subscribed" to publications like The Risks Digest [ncl.ac.uk] and Crypto-gram [counterpane.com] because I make a point of viewing the web pages regularly. This model is of little value to a lot of publishers, because their content is not valuable enough that users will make a point of keeping up in this way
2. The subscription is recorded in the publisher's system. This is how email newsletters work. It's fine for the publisher, but unsatisfactory for the reader as he can get subscribed to things he doesn't want. Separating bona-fide subscribed content from spam is very difficult for filtering systems, and the result is that delivery failure rates are rising. This is where we are now, this is where we want to get away from.
3. The subscription is recorded in the subscriber's software. This is the ideal. I can choose to subscribe to something, and no-one can make me subscribe to anything I don't want. The subscribed content will appear in front of me without my needing to remember it or pick it out of a list of a hundred browser bookmarks. RSS falls into this category.

My pet theory is that there is another method that fits in the third category: email retrieved directly from the publisher's system by the subscriber's system using POP3. I subscribe to the content by adding an account to my mail client with the publisher's POP server, and a username of my choice. Doing a "get email" on my mail client will bring down the newsletter along with my other email. (IMAP or NNTP could be used the same way). The advantage of this over RSS is that the clients are already widespread, although ideally they would be enhanced to support this model more smoothly.

eliminates an obstacle to digital postage

People have recognized for a long time that the basic cause of spam is that spamming is free, as opposed to other forms of marketing that cost money to the sender. A sensible response has obviously been to make the sender of an e-mail pay money [hashcash.org].

Some objections to this have been (1) how do you process the payments without giving control over the internet to some evil corporation? (2) it's impractical to redesign the e-mail protocols and infrastructure, (3) mailing list operators can't pay to send every e-mail. Well, #1 is obviated by schemes like hashcash, where there's no real money involved. Re #2, this RSS example shows that the e-mail infrastrucure can and will be replaced, and there are ways to do it without having to make everybody change over to a new system overnight -- it can be done piecemeal. The RSS system may also show that #3 is not such a big deal, because maybe newsletters shouldn't go through the same channels as e-mail. (Note that the US postal service doesn't deliver newspapers.) Also, #3 was kind of silly anyway, because people can have a whitelist, and exempt people on their whitelist from paying to send them e-mail.

Unclear on RSS, explanation?

As far as I can gather from the article, RSS uses XML and can be read by web-browser or specialized client. Special RSS providers are the only way to access these "feeds."

How many people want to buy or download yet ANOTHER program for their communication needs? We already have AIM, MSN, ICQ, YIM,IRC, five different proprietary video clients, and newsreaders. If using a web browser, who wants to visit twenty different websites to read their mailing lists(Yahoo Groups is bad enough isn't it?) On top of that, email still must be dealt with.

I can understand the benefits of it I think: Locked down feeds presenting a huge hurdle for spammers, XML for flexible programming, and a download as you go structure(like newsgroups).

I like email lists the way they are personally. I find spam to be easily identifiable so I don't lose tons of messages like the article mentions. I don't know if I'd go for it if it's like blogs. Email lists can get off topic, but blogs seem like they're always rambling. I've looked at the blogs of the people that belong to mailing lists I'm on, and there's no way they'd ever replace the email list.

Anybody care to give a good explanation about RSS?

RSS Via Jabber

Jabber supports "headlines" and there are several transports around that support sending RSS updates as jabber "headlines". You get a nice descrete notification that somethings happened (new story on slashdot?) and you can deal with it if you like.

You can publish almost anything as a RSS feed, for instance URL's mentioned on an IRC channel.

When combining technologies such as these you can get some real neat stuff happening. Sometime I want to write some scripts using naive bayes to sort out the RSS information I'm interested in vs the stuff I'm not and then have it subscribe to lots of RSS feeds :)

Question -- KNewsTicker

Is this RSS, or something else? I've got it scrolling at the bottom of my screen showing, among other things, slashdot headlines.

If KNewsTicker is what they mean by RSS then I'm all for it. If RSS shoves any more info at me that a couple of dozen chars and a URL then it is junk (spam). I'd never use something which was always dumping flashing pictures on my screen.

A combination of methods

I run a website (The View From The Ground [viewfromtheground.com]) that uses an email newsletter that monitors what the city, police, and other agencies are doing in Chicago public housing (the projects) because there is absolutely no public accountability. We don't spam, don't release our email list to anybody. We're very disciplined about the privacy of our list.

We've thought about going to RSS, but there are big advantages to using an email newsletter for such a purpose.

While our email publication is "unwelcome" in places like the police department in the sense that they rarely like what we have to say, everyone from top administrators to low level officers read it because it scares them. There have already been several successful lawsuits and many major news stories (in the Chicago locals like the Tribune and Sun-Times and some nationals like the New York Times) that generate public scrutiny.

Now, imagine people at the police department or the Chicago Housing Authority, whose technical proficiency is often, uh, lacking, setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to our feed in order to receive our publication. Further, email is easy to forward, and we often get feedback that reveals a long and sordid chain of forwards until it reaches the person in question. We have received amusing lawsuit threats (one from a major company president for "deflamation") with such histories attached. RSS feeds don't have the same forward-ability as email.

Not all email that is received in a spirit of hostility is spam, and sometimes, even if the receiver hates the message, they have to read it. But that's only if they get it. RSS significantly raises the barrier of entry, particularly for people without lots of Net savvy.

This isn't not to say we're not working on implementing RSS. We are, and expect it to dominate the friendly/sympathetic side of our distribution list once we implement it as a distribution method this fall.

The point is that email is still a killer application of the Internet for distributing journalistic content, and that RSS and email can coexist in a mutually beneficial way.

I hate to say it, but the only way we'd become RSS exclusive would be if the next version of IE (which may not appear for years) ships with a super-easy RSS feed reader because almost every city agency in Chicago is MS-exclusive. Until then, we'll do both.

Listservs will never die

There's only one problem with RSS compared to email, you have no way to control distribution, anyone can read the RSS. But with a listserv, you can control your distribution list easily. RSS is not a substitute for listservs. Everyone can get email, it's simple, but not everyone can grok an RSS aggregator.

Re:Listservs will never die

That's a good idea, now go write an RSS aggregator that supports HTTP auth,

You mean like this [userland.com]?

and then go convince everyone to support it in their servers.

No, only people who want private RSS files need to support it in their servers. And it's not like HTTP autentication is some sort of mystery, all reasonable web servers support it out of the box. After all, guess what, it's part of HTTP/1.0 [w3.org].

But first, you might want to think about how auth will interfere with RSS discovery (which is already screwed up enough).

Easy, it doesn't. Either you can get to the RSS feed or you can't, either way the aggregator has to handle it (people type in wrong URLs all the time, for instance, so any real aggregator has to handle errors).

You seriously overestimate the difficulty of this. Unusual, usually people underestimate difficulties. I hope you aren't a professional coder.

People just don't subscribe to email newsletters?

Personally, I find that I almost never subscribe to any email-based newsletters anymore because it just isn't the best mechanism for it.

When I check my email, it's nice to know that everything that comes in (short of spam) is targeted specifically at me. The newsletters, however useful and informative, tend to be lengthy and not the sort of thing I often have time to read when I'm trying to read and reply to my personal emails.

I realize the standard answer people give is to set up mailbox rules so the newsletters get tossed into their own folders. Sure, I can do that (and have often done so), but then I end up with a huge folder filled with overwhelming amounts of text to sift through. If I don't get time to read them for a few weeks, a lot of it ends up getting mass deleted. (It's not usually important enough to justify a marathon reading session to try to catch up with all the back messages piled up in there.)

I think of newsletters as publications, so as such, they're best published to the web - so viewers can access them at will. Don't take up everyone's disk space sending out hundreds (or thousands?) of copies of the same newsletter via email.

Web-based readers?

Anyone know of any good Web-based (ideally PHP-based) RSS news aggregators? I'm looking for something I can install on my website and customize to my liking.

good stuff to read?

So I keep reading all these articles about RSS news feeds and blogs, but I can't really find any good stuff to read.

So what does the Slashdot crowd recommend?

Email lists were never a good idea

It seems to me that email lists are trying to do what usenet was designed for. In that way, it's sort of a broken idea: newsgroups are for sending a message to a self-selecting group of people, email is for sending a message to one person. Trying to implement a mailing list in email is sort of a waste of resources, IMO.

RSS is a great idea!

Now, there are problems associated with this, but I think people are missing the point that this isn't (yet) a drop in replacement for grandma to get her quilting newsletter.

RSS is a relatively new creation, especially in terms of popularity and I think there are a large number of geeks like myself that will definitely like being able to pull the few newsletters or lists we like. Especially if they pull headlines and still make you request delivery or actually visit a web site.

I personally have loved watching readers (aggregators) develop and mature, as well as more sites coming online with content for them. I think this is certainly one of the things to watch as it is morphing the way we use the web.

Kind of like the evolution of blog style web sites that report news and commentary, so I don't have to hit the estimated 50 billion hardware review sites each day just to see what they have been playing with. Used with a /. style comment system and the newsletters could become quite an interesting niche in the internet over the next few years.

And yes, if it is popular Microsoft will probably make a stand alone reader or more likely bundle it with IE or Outlook Express.

ironic...

"E-mail is dead, period," declares Chris Pirillo, the Internet entrepreneur who distributes about 400,000 e-mail newsletters weekly. "I don't care what kind of legislation goes through, people aren't signing up for newsletters anymore. People are assuming that every e-mail publisher is a spammer."

I subscribe to the InternetNews daily newsletter and I heard about RSS through it. I guess Pirillo should be glad about that.

RSS vs. Email Archive... and then some.

I'm a big fan of RSS but I don't see it as a viable replacement for email. I subcribe to several mailing lists and I archive all of the content. The RSS applications that I'm familiar with provide no method for storing data locally.

Let's just kill all of the spammers and stop wasting time trying to avoid the garbage that they spew. By the way, why are spammers under the impression that I need penis enhancement drugs? I propose that if they send their girlfriend, wife or daughter to my place for a few days, they will soon have a different opinion. :p

Geek Handwriting...

My handwriting was bad before I got a computer and its been getting worse since. Damnit, I was hoping in the future I'd never have to hand-write anything again.

Irony

People are moving from email to RSS? That's ironic -- I know someone that just released a service that translates RSS feeds to email [indecorous.com], which seems like a knocking good idea to me.

Maybe the real lesson isn't "email bad, rss good", but that RSS has the nice property of allowing the user to select how she would prefer to access the resource in question -- maybe as email, maybe in a custom web page via Amphetadesk [disobey.com], or maybe in a special purpose application such as NetNewsWire [ranchero.com]. For that matter, maybe they'd like receiving info on a non-traditional device, such as a PDA or video game console, and RSS feeds can be more adaptable than other channels.

Personally, I like email, I've got processes for handling a silly volume of it, and the ability to get RSS feeds I'm interested mailed to me on some kind of schedule appeals to me -- even though the idea hadn't occurred to me before this weekend.

So the next question for me then is, for those of you that like RSS but don't care for email, how would you prefer to access such data? What software are you using today? What problems, if any, do you have with the way your RSS aggregator works? What properties would you like to see in such software tomorrow?

Disposable

Just dont ask for a persons address, ask them to use a disposable one instead, so they feel better, and theres no pressure on you. Few years ago Sneakemail tried to make an interface just for this purpose to make it easier, but nobody cared, see my sig for the link. Everybody is handling spam so badly and now people want to scrap the whole thing. If I left my car in a bad neighborhood with the windows rolled down who's fault is it when it gets stolen? Do I whine for more car theft legislation? Do I stop driving my car? Same with email, stop whoring your address everywhere.

Looking to try an aggregator? Try Bloglines

Our web-based aggregator, Bloglines, is an easy way to try out aggregation. No need to download and install a program. We have a search engine and a list of top RSS feeds to make finding syndicated content easier. See http://www.bloglines.com [bloglines.com] for more info.

obligatory SA plug

I'm on a pile of mailing lists, mostly because i'd rather have the list archives available to search/order with mutt than online.

Spamassassin solves any spam issues I have, and I haven't had a false positive since I crossed the threshold and bayesian kicked in.

Why the hell should I add another avenue of information access, enough already...

Anyone remember Pointcast?

It was a .bom startup from around 1996 that used "push" technology, which was really a client "pulling" info using an RSS type protocol.

Stating the Obvious:

Did it ever occur to anyone that most Listservs are TWO-WAY systems, and RSS syndication is a ONE-WAY system? If I want to reply to a list, I just reply via email, on most systems the message is instantly distributed to the list. This will never ever happen with RSS. RSS is a one-to-many distribution system, mailing lists are many-to-many systems. RSS is an implementation of a hierarchical authority structure, oh boy I just need more of that like I need more spam.
Ya know, I remember in the early days when there was no WWW, and listservs were considered a killer app. It's no different today, many people want an internet connection just to access and interact on specialized lists. Let us hope that this never goes away. The internet is not designed for us to all subscribe to the same RSS feeds, the internet is designed for us to talk to EACH OTHER.

Re:Stating the Obvious:

Yes. Thank you for being the one person on slashdot who hasn't drank whatever kool-aid convinces people that the internet is (and ought to be) divided into "content producers" and "content consumers". The internet's greatest virtue lies in its facilities for _completely_ interactive communication, where every participant has the same position in the conversation as every other.

Email lists are the quintessential example of this phenomenon.

Putting up web pages may be easy and cheap enough to be an option for everybody, but it doesn't provide the same level of interactivity as a mailing list can. A world in which everyone can be a producer as well as a consumer is not the same thing as a world in which everyone can be an equal participant. The latter is what we have, where the former is what replacing mailing lists with RSS feeds would give us in even the best case.

Mailing lists are delivered to the users' own mailboxes, at which point their data becomes unavailable only when the recipients decide to delete it. Web pages, on the other hand, are stored on central servers and are thus vulnerable not only to network outages but to gratuitous changes made server-side by webmasters, as well as other sorts of problems. For certain types of content (advertising newsletters would be a good example), this is not a meaningful limitation because the content itself is worthless if it's out of date...but that does not describe the sum total of discussion on mailing lists, and it does not make sense to introduce such unnecessary vulnerabilities.

RSS is good for what it's designed for...but please let's not try to throw away a working technology and substitute a kludged one in its place.

Dealing with mailing list spam

...people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer.

Sadly though this is often the case. The solution however is simple - create a different email address in your domain for each newsletter or company that you sign up for (for example "[e-mail]") and use this for transactions. When the spam starts arriving (you WILL get spammed if you use ticketmaster by the way - read the ToS) then redirect the address to the relevant abuse email. Voila - the people responsible for the spam report themselves.

Livejournal

Personally I use Livejournal as my newsreader. It's got pretty much the perfect system for me, as I can set up the layout how I like and it does all the checking for me. I can also check my news feeds from wherever I happen to be.

You can see the results at http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news
or the comics I receive over RSS at
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/co mics

Customised email client the answer

This is a sensible direction to go in. Legitimate bulk email needs to move to a model where the subscriber rather than the publisher controls the subscription, and RSS is one such system.

The problem at the moment is the low spread of RSS clients/viewers (I have never even seen one).

Another subscriber-controlled method of publication would be for each subscriber to have a mailbox on the publisher's system, accessible with POP3 (or IMAP or even NNTP).

This has the advantage that it is workable with today's email clients that everybody already has -- you just add a new POP server and username into your client config.

It is not ideal with most modern clients, but it works, and the clients can easily be enhanced to make it easier to add another subscription and have the messages dropped into your main mailbox for viewing.

I just tried AmphetaDesk and I'm impressed.

I had no idea so many feeds were available. This kind of thing is not good for someone like me. I've got a lifelong obsession with news that came from a childhood filled with the constant drone of NPR. Now, here's this vast new frontier of news. Dear lord save me. My whole family is going to end up stung on this. We'll never talk to each other again.
It is great to see a way to lurk newsletters in one conveient package without having to deal with the spam of using e-mail. I'm very impressed, but slightly embarrassed that I wasn't already using it.
I don't see why this limits interactivity. Most people reading newsletters are just lurking most of the time. There's no reason you can't still post an e-mail if you wish. If anything it should make newsletters much more active as more people feel free to lurk and keep up with the discussion.

Alternatively, read mailing lists via nntp

Or you could get the mailing list to be carried by Gmane [gmane.org] and browse the articles using a newsreader. No need for any of this newfangled RSS nonsense.

RSS via NNTP

News readers tend to be much more powerful than RSS agregators or email programs with RSS capability (e.g. evolution).

nntp//rss [methodize.org] is a nice tool for reading RSS feeds with your favorite newsreader.

IMHO this is a good replacement for (mostly) read-only mailing lists: it is much easier for the average person to set up a web forum with RSS than a NNTP server or even a (self-hosted) mailing list.

For interactive mailing lists, Gmane [gmane.org] is the tool of my choice.

Only problem is..

RSS sucks... and on windows at least there doesn't seem to be any small nonbloatware programs to scan this without using a lot of resources.

If you are going to dump email, you might as well just use a website.

Shameless plug

We offer a hybrid email/rss newsletter solution [server.com]. Visitors can opt to receive your newsletter via RSS or email.

Disadvantages of email

From the article:

"People are assuming that every e-mail publisher is a spammer."

That's not necessarily the issue. Instead, I think, lots of people just don't want to have to deal with separating the newsletter they want from the spam they don't want. And lots of others might be afraid their email address will leak (be sold) to a spammer. Unique mailbox addresses to sign up with might help, but most people don't have these nor know how to create them.

In some cases, signups to legitimate newsletters or mailing lists are failing because they are hosted by providers that have had, or maybe still have, spammers operating, and some ISPs are blocking them. Other disadvantages of email include the hassle of having to do a confirmation cycle (switch to the mail program) to sign up.

RSS seems like an interesting solution, but it's basically a one way feed although you can hyperlink to a web submission form if the newsletter provides two-way communication. Many have suggested NNTP (running isolated from the global USENET) for the more discussion oriented mailing lists. And another option is for the mailing list operator to host the mailboxes (stored shared) with access via IMAP. Perhaps integrating all of these into a web browser will make it all work better. Oh wait...

Beware the blog spam

Spammers do more than just flood email and usenet with garbage. They are also doing it via blog [tweney.com] and other feedback methods, especially those on spiderable web pages since that can raise search engine ratings for the spammers.

Missing the point...

Those who think RSS will/can replace email newsletters are missing the reasons people sign up for email newsletters. I don't want to have to remember to check a site for updates, because I will forget. I have my email open all day anyway, why do I want anotyher app open all day, sucking up resources? Every Wed. I get two newsletters from SANS, one of newsbites in security the other a list of security holes for the week. This is like having the newspaper delivered to my door. RSS is like having to goto the 7/11 and buy a copy. Besides the issues for me, the end user, there are a host of problems with RSS for the provider. Number one of those is cost; RSS costs more. In bandwidth alone the RSS costs to send out a newsletter like SANS would be huge. Have we forgotten all the fan sites that ask you to get headlines over email rather than soaking up their little bandwith from visiting the site 4-5 times a day? Remember that if email wasn't so cheap, spam wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Next is layout; XML is for describing data, not design (at least that's what it's good at; there is no end to the amount of effort spent trying to cram desing into XML). While I prefer all email to be in text, I like newsletters in a nice html layout so I can scan them quickly and find what I want to read. My XBoX newsletter comes this way. Another issue is install base. How many people won't bother to look at RSS because they don't have an RSS reader setup and don't want to or can't install one? Maybe the IT dept won't let you, or (like my parents) getting setup on email was tough enough. Now you want to make Mom learn another app just to keep reading her Cat Fancy newsletter? I still get calls to walk her though Cut-N-Paste, let me have some rest please! And what about announcments of an important nature? An ISP is still better off emailing it's customer base about an upcomming outage, than passivly posting it to and RSS feed. RSS is really good for cross-site syndication, no mistake about that. Even if we all went to RSS though, I fail to see how that would impact spam at all. We will still have email clients, and spammers can still send to our email clients.

My Yahoo should act as RSS aggregator

My Yahoo already helps me customize my information feed to some extent, but I am limited to their "walled garden". It would be great if I could add any RSS feed I like to my My Yahoo page.

How not to get labelled as spam

I've dealt with a number of email lists and have seen the occasional "WHY ARE YOU SPAMMING ME?" from someone who subscribed. I've also occasionally run into a reputable company that claims that I signed up for their spam when I know I didn't.

I've built a few simple rules for one-way (announcement) email lists that will prevent the vast majority of complaints:

1. Make your email list confirmed opt in. Remember those idiots who sign people they dont't like up for magazines with the "bill me later box" checked? It's even easier with the internet. I've seen this sort of attack myself. Fortunately most of the lists the idiot signed me up for with confirmed opt it, so I just ignored them and had no problem.

2. Let users know what frequency of email to expect. After the user has confirmed their subscription, you should be sending a "Welcome to our list" message. This message should include the estimated mail volume. This is most important for any list that sends email less frequently than weekly. Users can forget that they subscribed if two weeks goes by between subscription and first message. Given them a heads up.

3. Email at least monthly. If you don't have something to say at least monthly, you probably don't have a real use for an email list. After four weeks it's pretty easy to forget that you signed up for a list and it starts looking like spam.

4. After a few months of inactivity, your list is worthless. After a few months I guarantee many people will have forgotten about you. Others will assume you've given up and thus consider themselves unsubscribed. Maybe, just maybe, they'll remember who you are, but for at least a moment they'll think you're spam.

5. Make it easy to unsubscribe. Unsubscription information should be in every message. A web unsubscription interface is nice, but a "reply with unsubscribe" is mandatory. There is close to zero chance of a user being willing to enter a password to unsubscribe, especially if they don't remember signing up in the first place. Relatedly, direct replies to your message must go somewhere. Automatically pulling out and handling unsubscribes are a good idea, but anything the system can't process should be investigated by a human being. A customer that has problems unsubscribing is much more likely to track down every email address of yours they can find and email all of them with their complaint.

6. Be polite. The end user might be confused. Worse, the automated system you're so certain about might actually be misbehaving. Bug happen. Calling the user an idiot is unproductive. (Shoots dirty look to Dust Traxx in Chicago (some sort of club or record company, I guess) which repeatedly spammed me without my permission, whose unsubscription system failed repeatedly, then called me an idiot when I complained. After they promised to remove my address a few months later I'm getting spam from them again.)