The Down Side of Email Marketing

I love email marketing. I am a fully committed fanatic about it. I love the richness of the media, the instant gratification associated with a successful ezine broadcast, my customers saying, "Wow!," that's great!

What I don't love are the dirty little spammers who send their bots across the web harvesting email addresses and sucking bandwidth with solicitations to enlarge this, or enhance that or get rich without effort (buy their new ebook, "SPAMMING for Fun & Profit).

CAN-SPAM's a start but, to be honest, it's going to have more of an impact on the good guys than the bad. In the meantime, the Bad, as the Denver Post pointed out the other day, citing research done by Return Path - an email research firm, are the reason that as much as 37% of legitimate, opt-in e-mails are blocked. Maybe the solution is to return to the days of frontier justice where the rustlers wuz strung up where they wuz caught and left swinging in the wind fer the buzzards to munch and the other outlaws to see. Could be this is a little extreme but the Internet is a good thing - a great thing for smaller business in particular - being ruined by a few bad apples.

Respectfully submitted,

tom.gray@gemsolv.com