Frustrations of Publishing email Newsletters

For the past few days, I've subbed for my friend Carol Watson. Carol puts out a daily email prayer newsletter for the First Colony Church. Every once in a while when she has a chance to get away for a few days, I put it together and send it out for her.

Like all of us who publish email newsletters, Carol fights an ongoing battle to get her email letter through SPAM measures the ISP's are trying. The most frustrating problem for us is the technique more ISP's are implementing -- limiting the number of emails from a single address to their domain. In a place like Houston, lots of the folks we correspond with use local ISP's like Houston.rr.com and EV1. They are both using this technique. So Carol gets a lot of email from subscribers because their prayer email letter is not getting through.

If you keep up with the SPAM wars, you know that we're all losing (except the spammers). ISP's will try almost anything to reduce SPAM. The problem is that almost every measure they implement will prevent some SPAM from getting through, but also prevents some of the email people want from being received.

Seeing Carol's frustration this week caused me to do some rethinking about pushing information rather than allowing people to pull information. "Pushing" is using techniques like email. "Pulling" is using blogs or websites where people have to go look for it.

Generally, most of us like to have information we want pushed to us. It's easier for us because we don't have to think to go look for it. The problem, though, is that we are all having so much pushed at us that at times it's overwhelming. And when you put the SPAM problem on top of that, pushing information is becoming increasingly problematic both for the sender and the receiver.

Maybe it's time for some of us to rethink pushing vs. pulling. Blogs, while fundamentally a pulling technique, have tools available that will alert interested readers when the blog has been updated and provide simple click through navigation for the reader. I use Bloglines to remind me to read several blogs that are interesting to me. The Bloglines notifier is resident in my systray, and provides a message when one of the blogs is updated. So it's sort of like getting the email notice, but without the hassle. I expect to see more of us who are struggling trying to publish email newsletter transition to Blogs.

What holds us back is fear that some of our readers will not make the transition. But maybe if we can make it easy enough for them, they will. It might be worth an experiment!