February 05, 2006
AOL and Yahoo To Charge Postage Fee?
AOL and Yahoo both recently announced a special email delivery service with an associated postage fee. For a penny per email both services will deliver your mail to the intended recipient using a 'certified email system' that bypasses the recipient's spam filter. The thinking is that businesses relying on email communication might be willing to pay to end spam confusion and ensure that their legitimate messages are never mistaken for spam again.
Is this the start of something much bigger? Will all of those urban legends about paying a required per-email delivery fee finally come to pass? I doubt it. A precedent has been set and the public has an expectation around how email service is accessed and used. The public will likely demand that spam filtering be improved, spammers be forced offline, and AOL and Yahoo go back to improving the high quality services they're already commited to delivering as part of their existing agreements with customers.
Posted by Nancy at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2005
Email Ails
Finally! I feel validated by the results of this research. Too much email is very, very bad.
One of my biggest peeves in life (and in particular with advertising agencies) is the disease I call "Forward-itis." This is where people just randomly forward stuff and say things like "Read below."
Now, if I truly need to "read below," I don't mind. I like being kept in the loop. But, if there is only ONE nugget of information in a long-ass email, then do me a favor: pull out the nugget and skip the rest.
I feel like the convenience of email has made us lazy. Forward-itis is one example, but there is also this total lack of personal responsibility to take action until we have an email telling us we should. When servers go down (and I'm guilty of this as well), we all pretty much go home. We've been trained to think we can't do our jobs without email, when in reality email should be a tool that supports our jobs -- not the engine that drives them.
I'm just sayin'.
Posted by Meghan at 11:01 PM | Comments (1)