re: [epub] Re: ON - Line eZines vs. Email versions

[John Botscharow <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  >>  I'm curious as to why you think this. There are numerous legitimate
 >>  reasons
 >>  why people use free email accounts. Why does this disqualify any of them
 >>  from being serious about receiving ezines?

Experience!!! The vast majority of people who use Yahoo or Hotmail or TheMail accounts use them for one of two reasons:

1. They set up an autoresponder to send you their ad every time they get your ezine. That gets you unsubscribed from my list immediately.

2. They use the address as a dump account and never even open the message. They subscribed to get a free ad or some other freebie and could care less about the content.

1 and 2 are of course used in combination as well.

My personal feeling is I would rather have a list of only 500 QUALITY subscribers rather than a list of 5000, 4500 of whom never read the thing. That is why I monitor my list very closely and if I suspect a problem like 1 or 2, I deal with it.

 >>  I don't worry about spam from email publications either (you can usually
 >>  easily tell which ones are going to treat your email address with
 >>  respect).
 >>  But I wouldn't discount the possibility entirely.

No, in any situation there is the possibility of abuse. The question is who do you want to gear your ezine to - to your quality subscribers or to the idiots. Too many on the Internet do things to keep out the idiots at the expense of their customers. That only breeds more and more sophisticated abuse.

You cannot stop the abuse by setting up walls that keep out the people you want to attract. From the tone of a lot of the posts, some of the people on this list are doing things out of fear of this or fear of that. That is not the way to run an ezine or any business. find out what your customers want and then give it to them, even if it is something you may personally fear. Set up ways to protect YOURSELF if need be, but do not impose your own fears on your subscribers. If they all feel the same way you do, fine. But find out first.

 >>  Tombo, you and the other fine people here are undoubtedly ethical
 >>  publishers. But that doesn't mean there aren't others out there using a
 >>  spurious email publication as a means of harvesting addresses.

Web sites and classified ad sites are much better sources of addresses for harvesters. Does that mean we should get rid of our web sites and/orstop using classified sites??? don't do business based on fear.


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