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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."
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.
I was under the impression RSS was a pull mechanism, not a subscription mechanism.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Perhaps, in RSS, we are finally finding realization of all of that "push" hype put forth long ago?
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.
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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?
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
I run a website (The View From The Ground) 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.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
Yeah, if N=1 it's all good. Then either you get 200 bytes or 200 bytes + size of <item> + surrounding RSS elements. Not too many RSS files have been that small from what I've seen, but it would certainly make it almost push-like, which I still see as the god-like ideal.
I guess it comes down to the question, do you use mail routing to deliver your mail straight to your house, or do you use fetchmail from the house? If you perfer fetchmail, then you probably prefer RSS. If you would prefer to have it routed straight there, then use a method which routes it without having to be prodded every few minutes.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
I personally can't stand web forums...
Posted to slashdot
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.
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.
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.
So what does the Slashdot crowd recommend?
Try "Feed Demon" from the author of Topstyle and Homesite. It is in beta right now, but very stable and a killer app!
http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/
Essentially creates "newspapers" of RSS feeds you are interested in - great product.
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.
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.
/. style comment system and the newsletters could become quite an interesting niche in the internet over the next few years.
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
And yes, if it is popular Microsoft will probably make a stand alone reader or more likely bundle it with IE or Outlook Express.
...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?
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, or maybe in a special purpose application such as NetNewsWire. 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?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
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 for more info.
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 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.
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
It was a .bom startup from around 1996 that used "push" technology, which was really a client "pulling" info using an RSS type protocol.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
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.
...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 "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.
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.
or the comics I receive over RSS ato mics
You can see the results at http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/c
My Journal
And for all the talk about distributed, decentralized forums, Usenet seems to be it. Everything else, including this one, sit on a single service at more-or-less a single location.
RSS is in many ways very useful, but seems to pull down an unnecessary amount of useless information: the same lists get pulled whether or not they've been pulled before and whether or not they've been read before. A single UDP packet could be used for polling, it might be big enough to hold some kind of signature and state information. Could something be modeled (however vaguely) on how NTP spreads time data?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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.
nntp//rss 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 is the tool of my choice.
From the article:
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...
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...and probably doesn't cache .rdf, .rss, .asp, or .php files (since they're dynamic), one of which is the likely extension of your newsfeed. If you are stuck with AOL, and you notice that it is caching dynamic content, your most obvious recourse is to choose an ISP that doesn't do so.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law