emails

[Bastiaan Olij]

Hey Clifford,

> This is why there are so many of hosted email service providers. You
> could write a wonderful ham (as opposed to spam) cannon but if your
> emails don't even reach the inboxes of your target audience, you'll
> never know it, other than in terms of poor open and click-through
> rates. Those companies specialize in knowing what to do in order to
> get emails delivered to inboxes, not just accepted by the remote servers.
Yup, very true, both good and unfortunately..
>
>> Also there are countries where this breaks privacy laws but alas.
>
> Why would solicited, opt-in email that tracks open and click-through
> rates violate any privacy laws?
Yes, if you opt-in...

Same goes for me, I'm subscribed to several news letters and such
myself, my favourite being from the local IMAX cinema to which I often
gladly click through and get nice discounts on the latest movies they
are showing, as you say they already have all my details and they will
know that I order those tickets whether I do that at the box office or
through the linky in the emaily...

But a lot of these things are not solicited but unwanted emails I get
because I briefly passed a site that unknowingly put me on a mailing
list or simply coming from a nice spam list full of harvested email
addresses.

And how is my email server/virus scanner/whatever going to tell the
difference between the wanted opt-in mails I like to receive and the
bogus spam mail I rather not get? I'm doomed to receive the unwanted
mail in order to keep getting the wanted mail.

Couple that to using 3rd party marketeers who start tieing A and B
together with C to get a really nice picture of what you're interests
are and how you do your things, well I can see there are privacy issues.
Whether I chose to accept those privacy issues or raise concerns is a
nice but completely different discussion.

In some countries it seems politicians for right or wrong have objected
to these practices and in the name of privacy passed some nice laws. I'm
no lawyer nor someone who is very interested in the debate by a long
shot but it is something to be mindful of if you intend to enter this
side of the business.
-- 

Cheers,

Bastiaan Olij
e-mail/MSN: bastiaan at basenlily.me
web: http://www.basenlily.me
Skype: Mux213
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bastiaanolij