Forum Moderators: skibum
These sites do the hard work of developing content for each newsletter. They go through the continuing effort of attracting people to opt-in. Their hard work should pay off in direct advertising revenue or revenue from their affiliate arrangements.
They are hard working and playing by the rules.
Now another group of sites is working just as hard to make money. These are the myriad of entrepreneurs that are developing and marketing anti-spam filters.. It is big business and just about any halfway decent programmer can develop these hacks and cut himself in on it.
The demand for these filters are driven by 30 billion emails sent worldwide daily. Only a quarter of these emails are spam. Anti-spam filters are increasing being used as electronic censors to try to filter out unwanted email. Once the filters go into place most users find the volume of their mail cut in half or even more dramatically reduced. Clearly most of these filters have a huge margin of error.
One email provider is said to be dropping a 1 billion pieces of email a day. He is keeping track of what list you opted-into, is he? He is playing god.
How much of what is being filtered and dropped is really legitimate opt-in email? How many responses to a customer service request are filtered out?
What is the impact on the advertisers that buy advertising space in the newsletters? What is the effect on the affiliate programs that don’t get the click-thrus. Is the impact so great that it will kill off the newsletter market?
Is the cure worse than the illness?
I do think the user should have the privilege of reviewing filtered items before they're deleted permanently. That can be done on the user's PC or--better yet--via a Web page at the sever. But spam filtering is quickly becoming a necessity, like virus protection.
