The article starts:


"For Jodie Gastel, it seemed like a perfect marketing opportunity. The Victoria, B.C., entrepreneur, founder of the online gift service ScoreBrowniePoints.com , was scheduled to appear on Your Mac Life , an Internet radio show. So she fired off a quick e-mail to 1,000 of her regular customers: 'Click here and catch me live on streaming video!'

"Less than 24 hours later, Gastel received a stern message from her Internet hosting service. A user had reported her e-mail as spam, the host told her. One more complaint, and she'd be shut down for good. 'I was very spooked,' Gastel says. 'One complaint and I came this close to out of business.' "

Um, actually, what Jodie Gastel did sounds like spam to me. If I buy something a few times from a company, that does not mean that I want to get e-mail when the owner of the company appears on Internet radio. In 1997, when I was getting just a couple of spam messages a day, I'd've just shrugged it off -- "just hit delete," as the e-mail marketers like to advise -- but in the current environment, extreme vigilance against spam seems warranted.

The problem that weighs most heavily on my time is when one-on-one messages fail to get through. Reasonable people can disagree on whether a particular bulk marketing message falls within the definition of spam, but I think EVERYONE will agree that if I send a message to a freelancer who I'm supervising, that message should GET THROUGH. And yet I spend more time than I care to think about calling people up to say, "Did you get my e-mail?" trying to figure out an alternate channel when they DON'T get my e-mail, and also trying to figure out why SMTP servers are sending bounce messages when I try to send e-mail after my ISP reconfigures its SMTP servers and doesn't tell me about it.

Mitch Wagner





At 10:34 AM 7/30/2003, justin5667 wrote:

Marketers who rely on e-mail are getting zapped by aggressive new
spam filters. To circumvent them, some companies are going retro,
others super techno

By: Ellen Neuborne
Inc. Magazine, Augusr 2003

Complete Article:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20030801/marketing.html

[Excerpt]

"As the war on spam heats up, innocent bystanders are being caught
in the crossfire -- namely the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs
who have embraced e-mail marketing as a cheap, effective way to
maintain strong customer relationships without shelling out big
bucks for a traditional media campaign.

"Now, after finally figuring out how to make e-mail work for them,
marketers have found that the rules have changed. Their legitimate
messages are being blocked by a new breed of super-aggressive spam
filters..."




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