Growing an Email Newsletter Subscriber Base

[alika]

One of my pet peeves is to receive an email newsletter that I never asked, never subscribed to, and I've never even heard of the website. Then at the bottom of the newsletter I see "this newsletter has 1 million subscribers" or something. Sure, they have 1 million or so readers because they sign up people that never signed up for them. It really ticks me off to receive these kinds of newsletters, more so when the newsletter will clog my inbox on a regular basis.

Is this strategy -- automatically signing up a person you think would be interested -- a viable way to grow a newsletter? I think it would just tick off people. What have been your experiences?

[ganderla]

I am a fairly new site with a very small newsletter base and I send out a monthly that is very content rich with NO ads. I would never send it to someone who did not ask for it and i make it very clear all over the email how then can unsubscribe. It makes me mad to get things I did not ask for either and I do not understand how people would ever read this type of spam. I feel like I would lose people if I ever did anything bad with the email address or newsletter (also violating my own privacy policy). I have never had one complaint or never even had an unsubscriber.