Re: Unsubscribing and HTML e-mail?

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

Kat,

I attempted to send this to you off-list, but it bounced; so I'll 
address your accusation on-list.

Not guilty. I think your criticism is unfair and unwarranted. People 
come to our site, see a webinar they want to sign up for, and register 
on the site so they can sign up for the event. The opt-in checkbox is 
the last item above the Submit button. There is nothing coy or deceptive 
about it, and the only emails we send are to announce additional 
webinars in the same series. We send out the emails and we get a pretty 
decent response rate. All the events are free and we try to make them 
meaningful and valuable to the participants. The fact that a bunch of 
criminals choose to use the same medium is no reason to abandon it to them.

I get (because one of my aliases is webmaster@) several hundred spam 
messages a day. Mixed in are bulk emails from Adobe, Seybold, Network 
Solutions, and various other outfits I've done business with. I may or 
may not be interested in what they have to say; I may or may not delete 
their emails without opening them; but I am not offended that they are 
trying to communicate with me. It seems pretty easy to me to recognize a 
difference in kind between those handful of messages and the hundreds of 
messages trying to sell me breast enlargement, Viagra, or get-rich-quick 
schemes.

Maybe in your ideal world there would be no marketing activities at all. 
People would make products, and other people would seek them out and buy 
them, without any intervening communication. However, I'm not aware of 
anything bigger than a corner diner that can succeed that way.

Dick

Kat Nagel wrote: