Inc Magazine offers an interesting article on the problems that legitimate email marketers are experiencing due to spam filters and other email woes. Chris Pirillo is quoted as saying that “E-mail is a polluted medium. It’s dead.”
And I have to agree with him, based on my experience. I recently discontinued my own email newsletter due to all the problems with it – and it only went out a few times a year to let people know about new versions of TopStyle. This was an opt-in mailing list, but no matter what I did, somehow I still ended up on anti-spam blacklists, and getting off these lists takes time that I’d rather spend developing software.
As a result of being blacklisted without my knowledge, I constantly fielded complaints from people wondering why they never received an email notifying them about a new TopStyle release. Invariably, the problem was that an anti-spam filter incorrectly flagged my email as spam, so the customer never received it.
It flat out wasn’t worth the trouble.
That’s why I created the TopStyle Blog last year and built it into TopStyle. It provided me a way to let customers know about new versions without all the hassles of email. Which, funny enough, led me to the world of RSS, resulting in the creation of FeedDemon.