Seth Godin: Spammer

A friend was checking his email on Yahoo yesterday, and he accidentally hit the Spam Folder button.

Up popped a list of 1,232 soon to be deleted pieces of spam. The first one? An announcement from me that I had emailed to my super-permissioned email list. This is a list of people that has never been rented, sold, harvested, compiled or messed with in any way. By any definition of spam (except of the one that matters... Yahoo's) this is not spam.

But they say it is, so it is.

I'm not annoyed at their filter or even at the situation. I am disappointed, though, that spammers have had such an impact that email marketing (or even email notification of free online content with no money involved) is breathing its last.

Sigh.

RSS can't come a moment too soon. It's become more and more clear to me over the last five years that email is simultaneously too powerful (people who read it jump) and too weak (spammers have trained us not to read it) to last for much longer.