Subject: Re: [Asrg] 6. Proposals - depracate all list/bulk mailing and changeto RSS

From: Walter Dnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 00:12:31 -0500

On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 12:11:59PM -0800, Bill Pease wrote

> Feature Limits:
> *Limited to no support for graphically-enhanced content

  That is a good thing.  If I see an interesting headline, I'll click on
the URL, and it'll take me to your super-duper/singing/dancing website.

> *Limited support for variety of content types typical in newsletter 
>  publishing

  It's a list of URLs.  If you have a high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth
version of your website, offer two URLs.

> *Limited support for tracking subscriber interaction with content

  Awwwwwwwww.  Guess what... Microsoft is blocking web bugs too...
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,60781,00.html

> *No support for various transactions that can be enabled within email 
> (e.g., donation, viral marketing).
                   ***************
  Ding ding ding ding ding... we have a winner!  The whole point behind
this mailing list is to reduce/eliminate unsolicited marketing.  If I
want really exciting offers daily, I'll point my newsreader at
alt.really.exciting.offers.  If I want something, *I* will initiate the
the contact.  I do *NOT* want to be marketed to via my inbox, any more
than I want to be marketed to via my phone at suppertime.  Do you
understand ?

  It's been my experience that marketing types think that email was
invented first and foremost for marketing and email-blasting.  Wrong; it
was invented as two-way communication.  If a potential customer emails
you asking for a quote on 1000 widgets, reply to their email with the
requested quote.  That is customer service.  Blasting out millions of
unsolicited emails contributes to the destruction of the medium.

-- 
Walter Dnes <[email-masked]>
Email users are divided into two classes;
1) Those who have effective spam-blocking
2) Those who wish they did

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: Walter Dnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 00:21:06 -0500

On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 03:23:50PM -0500, Yakov Shafranovich wrote

> >RSS feeds have a long way to go before legitimate email publishers
> >(such as all of my company's clients - member-based organizations like 
> >AFL-CIO,  Public Broadcasting System, American Red Cross - would be 
> >willing to abandon push email for pull news aggregators.
> 
> Would email publishers be willing to pursue the "pull" approach to the 
> extend that they are willing to sit down and work out the different 
> issues involved? Or is "pull" currently a "non-starter" in those 
> communities?

  I may be getting cynical in my old age, but I think it'll be a
non-starter.  The good part of pull, as far as I'm concerned, is that
control rests with the end user, not the marketer.  The bad part of
pull, as far as the marketer is concerned, is that control rests with
the end user, not the marketer.

---

From: "Chris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 15:56:38 +1030

> > (e.g., donation, viral marketing).

In that case set your personal filters or whatever to "NO UCE"

but let the rest of the world decide what it wants and doesn't want to read.

speaking for myself I don't think you should be telling me what I want to
get in my mail box or don't want to get.

of course I might be alone in this.

Regards
Chris

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
> Walter Dnes
> Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 3:43 PM
> To: ASRG list
> Subject: Re: [Asrg] 6. Proposals - depracate all list/bulk mailing and
> changeto RSS
>
>

---

From: "Chris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 16:10:14 +1030

>
> The good part of pull, as far as I'm concerned, is that

I can agree with you on this one.

Regards
Chris

> Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 3:51 PM
> To: ASRG list

---

From: Bill Cole <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 09:54:32 -0500

At 12:11 PM -0800 11/30/03, Bill Pease wrote:
>  >Email is being abused as a broadcast medium.  By deprecating all mass
>>mailings, and going RSS (i.e. pull feeds), we will cut the rug out from
>>under the feet of so-called "legitimate bulk e-mailers".  Such a thing
>>will no longer exist by definition.  They will stick out like sore
>>thumbs.  Legitimate communities of interest can use RSS or internal
>>usenet feeds or web-bords or whatever.
>
>To recommend that "legitimate communities of interest" abandon their 
>current communication practices and switch to a distribution 
>mechanism that has virtually no market penetration seems as extreme 
>to me as attempting to redesign SMTP from the ground up to cure the 
>spam problem.
>
>(such as all of my company's clients - member-based organizations 
>like AFL-CIO,  Public Broadcasting System, American Red Cross - 
>would be willing to abandon push email for pull news aggregators.

I guess we each see things from our own perspectives. I see the BBC, 
the Guardian, most tech news operations, and nearly ever 'blogger' on 
the planet using RSS and marketers moving to it as a means of 
escaping the problems of email.

It should be noted for readers that you are coming at this from the 
perspective of a company which sends unsolicited bulk email for 
profit and goes so far as to maintain a fraudulent .org domain 
registration in support of that endeavor.

>In summary:
>
>Audience Reach Limits:
>*RSS readers have very limited market penetration (<5%), requiring 
>installation of additional software into email client, browser or 
>desktop

That is remarkably like the 1993 argument for remaining with Gopher. 
HTTP/HTML client penetration was lousy.

>*Limited support for variety of content types typical in newsletter publishing

These apply to email far more, and for both media are client-bound. 
One way in which RSS is an improvement in this area is that an 
increasing number of organizations are starting to treat email with 
'rich' content as spam, and simply dropping it at the mail server. 
RSS clients are just specialized HTTP clients, so that sort of risk 
is essentially zero. The issue of aggregators not directly supporting 
rich content is more complex -- see below.

>*No support for content customization or personalization based on 
>subscriber attributes

False. It has to be worked a different way than with email but 
customized RSS is no harder than customized HTML. You have to think 
of it as a web application, not a mail-merge project.

>*Limited support for tracking subscriber interaction with content

That is more limited with email than most people in your business 
care to admit. Tracking anything other than whether a user 
intentionally follows an URL in email  was never very reliable and is 
persistently becoming less so, to the point where the claims of some 
people in the email marketing business regarding things like 'web 
bugs' is now bordering on fraudulent.

>*No support for various transactions that can be enabled within 
>email (e.g., donation, viral marketing).

It seems that you have missed out on how RSS clients get used and on 
what an RSS feed actually is. They are typically not total 
replacements for web clients and the full web-based versions of 
content, but rather a way for users to see an overview of a 
publisher's current content with every item having a link to the full 
content. Anything that you can do on a website can be syndicated 
(i.e. *ADVERTISED* to people who have affirmatively chosen to see 
your ads) with RSS.

It is true that today there is not enough market penetration of 
decent clients to flip a switch and move every mailing list of every 
flavor to RSS, and that the way clients currently exist for the most 
part is a hindrance, but it is pretty clear that this is a short-term 
issue. There are already developers hooking in aggregators to Outlook 
and combining them with web browsers. RSS is an easy addition to 
modern browsers because it is an XML application, and it takes very 
little in the way of extra smarts to make a web browser parse RSS and 
present it in a useful way.

>See 
>http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1963664
>http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3070851
>http://rss.lockergnome.com/archives/services/007074.phtml
>http://rss.lockergnome.com/archives/opinion/006902.phtml
>
>for some balanced discussions within the email publishers world 
>about the potential advantages/disadvantages of RSS as a 
>distribution channel.

I find it interesting that aside from the issue of whether people 
have clients now, which is a real but very likely quite short-term 
issue, nearly all of the cited disadvantages are concerns exclusively 
for marketers. This points at a significant problem for email 
marketers because as varieties of bulk mail which are not so 
marketing-oriented join the bloggers in using RSS and abandon any 
need to think about the entire issue of spam, bulk email will become 
increasing only a medium for marketing of various sorts (including 
that done by entities like PBS and the American Red Cross) and simply 
whacking all bulk  email at the server level will become increasingly 
attractive to most mail server operators. Right now, that's a hard 
decision to take on a policy level but an increasingly easy decision 
to implement technically. As the balance of benefits to recipients 
versus benefits to sender shifts increasingly away from recipients, 
people who serve recipients will find it easier to make that policy 
decision to the detriment of senders.

-- 
Bill Cole                                  
[email-masked]

---

From: Walter Dnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 22:41:19 -0500

On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 03:56:38PM +1030, Chris wrote
> speaking for myself I don't think you should be telling me what I
> want to get in my mail box or don't want to get.
> 

  I have no desire to stop email that you want to receive.  What I do
object to is unsolicited bulk email that gets sent to me.  And I don't
see why I should have to run filters, etc, to allow you to get email ads
that you want.  Install an RSS client.  Or download shareware, and let
it pop up ads on your desktop<g>.

---

From: "Chris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 17:22:42 +1030

> object to is unsolicited bulk email that gets sent to me.

Thats the purpose of this group, to define ways to let you get what you want
and I get what I want

I want my local airlines to send me details of their "specials" sometimes
four a week

I have opted in
I *want* it in my inbox

I don't want to have to keep reminding myself to "check my feed" or have
YAP(yet another app) on my desktop
and they don't do RSS anyway

Are you going to force the airline companys to set up a feed for me?

Regards
Chris

> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 2:11 PM
> To: ASRG list

---

From: Walter Dnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 21:22:28 -0500

On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 05:22:42PM +1030, Chris wrote

> I don't want to have to keep reminding myself to "check my feed" or
> have YAP(yet another app) on my desktop and they don't do RSS anyway
> 

  For much the same reason we had to shut down open relays... the answer
to your question is "yes".  They were convenient, but were also massively
abused.  A one-to-one answer to a question is one thing.  Big email
shotgun blasts aimed at the entire internet are totally another.

  Some time ago, I made a rather sarcastic posting defying marketeers to
set up their own "unfiltered ISP", and watch current big ISPs collapse
overnight as millions of "eager double-opt-in-subscribers" defect to the
marketeers' ISP in order not be deprived of their newsletters.  It looks
more reasonable as time goes on.  With all the complaints about false
positives, why don't people set up unfiltered ISPs ?  Why doesn't
someone put up or shut up ?

---

From: "Chris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 13:19:10 +1030

Chris wrote..
> > Are you going to force the airline companys to set up a feed for me?
(RSS)

Walter replied..

> abused.

Any attempt to force someone to do something is destined to fail.
If the current system works for them then they won't change.

so we have to change the current system.
not try to force people to use another system.

And since when have we managed to shut down open relays?

e-mail is a one to one or one to many. that is the way it was designed
how can we change that?

Most e-mail is not "blasted out onto the internet" as you say. but is in
fact customised to suit the individual recipient even if it is just a web
bug to track if the person opened the e-mail in a html capable reader.

so essentially that becomes a one to one mailing.

Regards
Chris

> Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 12:52 PM
> To: ASRG list