When is Spam not Spam?

This is a good one. Randy Cassingham is up in arms because Yahoo has blocked his This is True newsletter as spam. Why do they think it's spam? Because lots of Yahoo subscribers have flagged it as spam. Randy is cross about this because he has lost about 15,000 subscribers – 10 per cent of his readership.

Not all of them have flagged This is True as spam, of course, just enough of them to cross some invisible threshold and get him blacklisted by Yahoo. He calls these people "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth" because they asked to be put on the distribution list (and confirmed the request) and then clicked the This is Spam button when they didn't want it any more.

The thing is, it kind of is spam. I know that it's not unsolicited and Randy doesn't share his email lists and he has an unsubscribe link and honours all the unsubscribe requests promptly, but really, why do we need to use email for this? I used to subscribe to lots of email lists. Like ten years ago. But we have blogs now and RSS newsfeeds.

Hell, even Randy has a blog. Why does he need to send 150,000 emails a week to people who might or might not still want to read his newsletter? Even if they aren't savvy enough to use a newsreader, everyone knows how to bookmark a website.

Email newsletters are like usenet. When that was all there was, it was better than nothing but they are both incredibly bandwidth inefficient because they have to push content out to people who only might be interested, instead of waiting for someone to specifically ask.

Trust me Randy, anyone who can't be bothered to visit your blog, isn't really reading your newsletter, whether they originally asked for it or not. And if you keep sending people stuff that they aren't reading, don't be surprised when they mistake it for spam.