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."

Comments

Somewhat good.

[HyperColor Underware]

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.

hmm

[Trejkaz]

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

Re:hmm

[Xformer]

"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.

Re:hmm

[Malc]

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:I gave up mail lists for forums

[Malc]

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:Listservs will never die

[Jerf]

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

You mean like this?

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.

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.