E-mail Newsletters Switching To RSS 244
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
The possible problems with this is that spammers may set up fake sites that you might want to subscribe to for a newsletter, and then feed you spam. Of course, you can stop pulling from that site and I would think that would solve this problem. Anyone see any other problems or holes or inaccuracies in what I've said?
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
"Subscribe" by using an aggregator program or something else that polls that RSS feed
I personally keep up with
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Realization at last? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, it doesn't look like a problem until every single user on the Internet is doing the same thing, and then you realise it might be better to have a real pub/sub system in place instead of pull-based RSS.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:2, Interesting)
No, I'm not going to say who "we" are as I don't have the authority to speak for the company, and nor do I want the responsibility.
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:3, Interesting)
So that's the politically correct word for spam these days?
A lot of the complaints for spam I get at work are things that people signed up for and didn't know it meant they would be getting ads every other day. A lot of it is local clear channel radio stations, if you want to be a "preferred listener" and be elegible for contests you have to get on their spam lists.
That said, I have little reason to believe you are a real spammer. I've noticed that real companies lately generally do respect it if you unclick their checkboxes.
This is a different story from a couple years ago when it was common practice to add new types of promotions that were automatically turned on, even if you opted-out.
I wonder what goes through their heads? "Well only 200 people clicked the spam-me button, so we'll add a new checkbox in their existing account that is selected by default, that effectively means spam-me!"
Re:Newsgroups (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're talking about a web-based newsgroup, then the only way to effectively moderate it is to register users, which means giving out an email address, and you have that whole "providing an email address just to get spammed" issue again.
If you're talking about a restricted NNTP server, then you have the issue with 1) people actually knowing what NNTP/Usenet is, and 2) people having to deal with multiple NNTP servers (some news clients are better than others at dealing with that).
Certainly you can work around these problems, but there is nothing inherent in a restricted newsgroup that automatically makes them better than an RSS-based solution, especially for one-way traffic.
Re:Listservs will never die (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Dealing with mailing list spam (Score:3, Interesting)
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 "ticketmaster@mydomain.com") 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.
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed.
I send out a newsletter every week (usually). To subscribe, you must volunteer your address to a form on the site. When the confirmation request comes, it includes a hyperlink that combines my web site, your email address, and a unique md5 hash. Until you click that link, you receive nothing further from me. If no one clicks it, the address is erased 3 days later.
If you want to come off the list, it has a link at the bottom that does that automatically. You can also send an email to unsubscribe@ and I'll doublecheck that the address is removed before the next mailing.
It's a clean list with very few bounces. I usually get swamped with morons using autoresponders, but only a few bounces. The one time it landed me on a blacklist, it was because some asshat signed up for the express purpose of reporting it to Spamcop.
I don't understand why someone who wants to put out a legitimate newsletter can't make potential subscribers confirm when their address is signed up. It's just asking for abuse otherwise.
Customised email client the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
RSS via NNTP (Score:3, Interesting)
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.