A couple of months ago I was featured as the example of how spamphobia cripples webmasters and their sites. My friend, Giannis Stoilis was right: all my mailboxes would receive hundreds of spam mails per day, so I did my best to keep my “active” email address secret (the rest of them were so full of spam that I no longer used them).
Then came GMail. At first I just said “wow, it works!” but I did not realize until lately that after a couple of months (I redirected all my mail to my GMail account), I became to trust Google’s spam filtering so much that I felt free again to make my email address public again. My spam folder has more than 8500 mails in it but who cares?
And it’s not just GMail. At work we use SpheriQ that is very quite effective. Even though I don’t use their email services, I guess that Yahoo! and MSN spam filters have improved too.
The bottom line is that I no longer care about spam. I have the feeling that we are winning this war.
(At least against email spam. ‘Cause now we have link-spam and content spam…)
Sure you have a valid point from a user point of view but what if you put yourself in the advertiser’s shoes?
All web campaigns that aim in getting hot leads to be able to communicate in a customized & targeted (or even triggered) manner see many of their campaigns not passing these spam filters! And it’s not a matter of not knowing how to do their job right, it’s about the strictness of these spam filters.
Cause we use SpheriQ at work as well and many email marketing campaigns of companies that I’ve opted-in are ending up there (also the same thing happens @ Y! bulk folder). This diminishes the value of web advertising, so we might be winning the war against spam but with a cost. The cost of lost revenue to the web as a medium that it is necessary for helping it evolves.
Well… Maybe advertisers should consider using other media. How about RSS?