Re: Unsubscribing and HTML e-mail?

Subject: Re: Unsubscribing and HTML e-mail?
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2003 21:54:02 -0400


Kat,

I attempted to send this to you off-list, but it bounced; so I'll address your accusation on-list.

Not guilty. I think your criticism is unfair and unwarranted. People come to our site, see a webinar they want to sign up for, and register on the site so they can sign up for the event. The opt-in checkbox is the last item above the Submit button. There is nothing coy or deceptive about it, and the only emails we send are to announce additional webinars in the same series. We send out the emails and we get a pretty decent response rate. All the events are free and we try to make them meaningful and valuable to the participants. The fact that a bunch of criminals choose to use the same medium is no reason to abandon it to them.

I get (because one of my aliases is webmaster@) several hundred spam messages a day. Mixed in are bulk emails from Adobe, Seybold, Network Solutions, and various other outfits I've done business with. I may or may not be interested in what they have to say; I may or may not delete their emails without opening them; but I am not offended that they are trying to communicate with me. It seems pretty easy to me to recognize a difference in kind between those handful of messages and the hundreds of messages trying to sell me breast enlargement, Viagra, or get-rich-quick schemes.

Maybe in your ideal world there would be no marketing activities at all. People would make products, and other people would seek them out and buy them, without any intervening communication. However, I'm not aware of anything bigger than a corner diner that can succeed that way.

Dick

Kat Nagel wrote:


At 03:07 PM -0400 2003-09-12, Dick Margulis wrote:

We have a mailing list of about 4,500 valid names. We get roughly five or six unsubscribes after each mailing. The topic I was trying to inquire about when I started this thread was how to get past mail admins who prevent people from receiving messages they apparently WANT to get, not how to best accommodate people who do NOT want to hear from us.



It isn't necessarily safe to assume the non-complainers actually want your stuff. They may just be deleting it and grumbling. (Or not grumbling, if the spam filter is doing its job properly and they never see it.)

As a recipient who absolutely *hates* companies that use the Default=ON trick, as well as those who lump access to tech support mail with opting-in for all the marketing junk, if the people really do want those messages, THEY can make the necessary arrangements with the mail admin.




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