By: Taban Khajehnassiri
Have you ever tried to run a newsletter? Have you ever asked or invited people to subscribe your newsletter? Have you ever tracked your newsletter's undelivered messages? If you have ever tried the above measures, you would get me and you would know how difficult it is nowadays to run sites presenting newsletters in order to be in touch with visitors, supporters and prospects. You know that many of your subscribers are using free-email sites such as Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts for most of their email communications. You don not know if they are really true and ...
Yes, It's true. Many people are now using these free services to communicate with their friends and family members while they are online. They are using them because they can easily set up their first fast and free email account, then their new accounts with different identities. Let's say many individuals are now using this free services to chat with fellows they know or they even don't know them personally. They are spending their online time, viewing their advertisements and receiving their marketing materials and spreading their viral marketing strategies - that one line promotion at the bottom of each and every e-mail sent to a number of friends - without this awareness that they are spreading the words of an endless community that can be no longer popular among true net users and folks who are true and with only one identity while they are online.
Have you ever tried to run a newsletter? Have you ever asked or invited people to subscribe your newsletter? Have you ever tracked your newsletter's undelivered messages? If you have ever tried the above measures, you would get me and you would know how difficult it is nowadays to run sites presenting newsletters in order to be in touch with visitors, supporters and prospects. You know that many of your subscribers are using
free-email sites such as Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts for most of their email communications. Many of our bounces every time we send out our newsletters to our subscribers are originally from such free email accounts in Yahoo and Hotmail because of delivery problems, unsuccessful delivery attempts, over quota, disabled and/or discontinued accounts. Online publishers are finally taking drastic measures in case of such email accounts and their bounces: they are unsubscribing every reader with a Hotmail and Yahoo account email address.
At first online publishers send their op-in and opt-out subscribers and readers a letter explaining why they do this giving them this again option to re-subscribe and warning them that the next time their email address bounced, they would be unsubscribed permanently. Last year, we lost many of our subscribers only because of a sudden decision by Listbot to change the Free service to a paid one and today we are facing another big challenge for our newsletters that is unsubscribing bounced email accounts from Free email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo!.
Yes, it's true and again it is happening on the net.What caused online newsletter publishers to make this decision to unsubscribe all their Yahoo people? In case of Hotmail, we have faced that many of our mailings have been directed to our readers' junk mail folder or bulk mail folder and consider our postings as a spam and save them in a spam folder because of their filtering issues that cannot realize our content and policies, our opt-out procedures or just the name we use for the accounts we use to send out our electronic newsletters showing our domain name address as sender. At the moment, Hotmail isn't a big problem for newsletter publishers, but in future if publishers receive bounces from their free clients they would be out of lists too. The fact for newsletter publishers is that they don't want "email addresses" on their lists. They want people, interested people using and enjoying the content of the sent newsletters, following the series of editorials and/or articles, visiting the sites being referred to.
At present, it is obvious that many people use (in many cases their several) free accounts from Yahoo! and Hotmail. It is clear that these accounts are not authenticated as people can sign in and get various accounts with other people's name and address details. It is now starting among site owners, webmasters and online publishers to reject sign-ins and subscribe requests from such free web-based email services, because in most cases they can be phony. Again, publishers want people to be in their lists not merely emails addresses.
On the other hand, many email addresses are fake and spammers change them very often, especially those from adult web site advertisers. Many scammers and spammers are using such free accounts from Yahoo! or Hotmail as their main accounts by which they send their bulk advertising materials and this is another reason for net users and sites webmasters to avoid spending their time on them answering their questions, listing them or even using such accounts. Free email services are doomed to die soon and it is so obvious, because they are becoming communities for frauds and scammers, they are loosing their popularity among those true net and information age users. These free services do require advertisements to stay online and active, they need more users for their ads to be placed at the bottom of each and every emails sent by the client and at the top of each pages visited on the site such as the main mailbox, inbox and outbox and sent or saved items. These free services do not care about you as human beings behind that computer set. They don't care about who is using their free services and for what purposes, and this is another opportunity for those email services who charge users for using their POP3 or Web-based email services, because they give credit to their users. They simply and obviously care and support their users and clients.
Personally, I don't like Yahoo! accounts and also I am not fond of Hotmail Free accounts. I am no longer far more concerned with spending my time, money and information resources with those who use such free accounts and asking me questions or sending me proposals for further projects and/or negotiations. I am far more concerned with spending my time on people with an active authenticated email account and also who with true interest in developing their online presence by their authenticated web address. People who really read and use the information we provide them with on our sites and send information out to them and we, from time to time, receive their true feedback, views and comments, are among our true online target audience. I personally no longer have interest in people who subscribe and then simply ignore what we are sending them via our newsletters. We need feedback, otherwise we unsubscribe those who are passive and act as a robot behind their fake email address.
This article first published electronically as an editorial of ALL-VISITORS NEWSLETTER - April 13, 2002.