Congrats to Scott Weiss and the whole crew at Ironport (read the announcement -- bought by Cisco for $800mm in cash and stock). I had a chance to meet Scott back when email was my life, and from the beginning it was clear they were building a great product and a great company. Kudos!
Oh, man things are getting interesting in the Google v. Yahoo v. Microsoft battle. Gotta believe that Yahoo didn't pick up Stata Labs for their Windows spam assassin client, but rather for the search tech that's inside Bloomba. It's not hard to imagine them building a rich client for email and feed reading that complements the online experience that I'm sure they're building with what they picked up from Oddpost.
The other interesting thing about this is that the Outlook-alternative market is once again wide open. It's now down to Eudora and Thunderbird, neither of which have decent email search tools, nor offer any significant "intertwinglyness" that modern communication clients so desperately need.
You'd think by now -- more than 10 months after CAN-SPAM went into effect -- that companies doing legitimate business via email would have their act together about opt-out language and workflow.
Not so much.
That thumbnail (click for a bigger version) is a just-captured screenshot from Jet Blue's unsubscribe page. The language reads...
To unsubscribe from our mailing list, please confirm the information below and click submit.
Email address: michael@the...
Unsubscribe: ( ) IN ( ) OUT
Do I choose "in" to "opt-in" to their unsubscribe list? Or do I choose "out" to opt out of their subscription list?
Now, under a strict interpretation of the law, Jet Blue is probably in compliance. Their message contained a clear and conspicuous method of unsubscribing -- a link to this unsubscribe page; and the law doesn't specify any ease-of-use requirements for the web-based opt-out process.
That process, by the way, should be considered an opportunity to thank the customer for their business, not to confuse and obfuscate the unsbuscribe process. Companies that do it right use appropriate copy and design to (a) try to convince the customer to dial back their subscription preferences instead of unsubbing entirely, and/or (b) thank them for the privilege they've had of landing in their inbox, and apologize for disappointing them. Despite the millions of dollars of investment in a "friendly" brand image, all Jet Blue manages to do here is further annoy an already annoyed customer.
Why are marketers so afraid of gmail?
So Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive, a successful email services agency, had a piece in this week's ClickZ titled Do You Gmail?, in which he advised marketers to consider refusing to send email to customers with gmail.com addresses. As DiGuido explains it, the fear is that companies who have spent dear resources on customer acquisition will have their messages delivered alongside contextual ads for competitive products and services.
A major credit card issuer excels at attracting a particular market segment. Gmail offers that company's envious competitors the opportunity to specifically and efficiently target that issuer's customers with contextual ads. The marketer spent millions growing this segment; should it be protected?Now, given the overall noise in the market, and the challenging signal/noise ratio in the email channel in particular, one would think that marketers would be looking for any invitation to communicate directly with their customers. How could a marketer even think about disrepecting a customer's choice of email domains by refusing to send them email? If your relationship with your customer is so tenuous that you're worried about contextual text ads inside gmail having a significant impact on your customer lifetime value equation, then maybe you shouldn't be emailing that customer in the first place.
So AOL picked up Mailblocks. All the attention is focused on the Mailblocks challenge / response filtering methodology, which reportedly AOL will integrate into its existing mail services. News.com even described Mailblocks as an "antispam software company" in its story, instead of an email inbox provider (web, POP, IMAP) with great filtering tools. But I'm more interested in what they're going to do with Mailblocks' web app, which while less whiz-bangy than Oddpost's is faster and more usable...though still not on Firefox.
Terms weren't disclosed. Any guesses? Oddpost: $30mm. Mailblocks: $____mm?
This actually did surprise me -- Microsoft bought Lookout, the search plugin that made Outlook usable for email addicts. I thought Microsoft would insist on doing this themselves....
Following the lead of Rabid Squirrel's g-mailto, I worked up a bookmarklet to pop up a new message window off my browser toolbar. I've only tested this on IE6 for Windows, but it's the standard javascript stuff, so it should work everywhere. Here you go...
» Drag this link to your toolbar: g-mailto
If you read the Rabid Squirrel definition of field variables (to, cc, bcc, subject, body, etc.) you could probably modify the link above to fit your particular email needs. I haven't yet mucked about to see if it's possible to pull page titles or selected text from the browser and force it into message fields, but if that's possible the bookmarklet could become a great way to have the "send page by email" function via Gmail.
Update. Lazyweb to the rescue! The ever-resourceful Adam Mathes hacked up an improvement that pulls the current page's title and inserts into the subject line, inserts the page URL and any selected text into the body of the message. You can grab it here, or just do the drag thing again...
» Drag this link to your toolbar: g-mailit
I've got both of these living side by side now. One for quick access to a blank message (g-mailto), the other for "mail this page" functionality (g-mailit).
Enjoy.
Apologies in advance for the less than half-baked rambler ahead, but Bill Seitz hits on something interesting about RSS and information management...
When an RSS item tells you something important, and you want to remember it, how do you do that? If it were EMail, you'd stick it in a folder, maybe set a flag or label on it. I guess now you blog it, which has the advantage of allowing you to attach more custom Meta Data so that it should be easier to find later. And some Rss Aggregator-s already have a "save" function, which I guess is an OK temporary approach...Caveat the following as being from one data point -- me. While I wait for the ultimate microcontent client, I find that I'm using several different "remembering" methodologies. And the decision re. which one to use is based on the interaction of privacy and context.
High privacy / high context: it goes in The Brain. Yep, still use it. Not as frequently as I once did, but it's where I store links to companies, articles, people, etc., with related notes. It's the personal research library.Which reminds me of Anil's piece from late 2002 on the ultimate microcontent client. Still haven't seen it, and yet the more I think about this problem of information discovery, sharing, routing and group forming, the more it seems that we're headed to a deeper merger of the mail client, the browser and various and sundry publishing and content archiving systems.Low privacy / low context: it goes in Delicious. Transient links of interest. The URL can stand on its own, and is linked to in an act of "hey, plus one from this corner."
Low privacy / high context: blog it. Links of interest that require some sort of blather-mouthed commentary to prove just how "smart" I am.
"Sharable" privacy / varying levels of context: email it to folks. Like the story I sent to Matt Haughey yesterday about the ad buy that Schwab's making on the Tivo network.
I remain unconvinced that there would be anything better suited to this task than an email-like application that's well integrated with the browser. What we're talking about here is messaging: reading incoming messages (whether via email, RSS or whatever comes next), and writing outgoing messages: some to individual contacts, some to public spaces (like sippey.com or delicious), some to semi-private group spaces (on orkut or flickr or mailing lists), some to a personal archive, and some to one or more of those destinations (cc, anyone?).
So...universal inbox (email, notifications, RSS subscriptions, whatever), universal outbox (email, blog postings, social network postings, social bookmarking, personal note taking / filing). All searchable. All cross-referenced with all the associated contact lists(s). All with dial-able social network-based filtering / content ranking.
I mean, c'mon, Google, is that too much to ask for?
Strong Week (a weekly email newsletter geared toward the lively arts) is back after a painful hiatus; now with editions for San Francisco and Portland.
"As in life itself, forward liberally."
Bryan Boyer points out a smart Gmail UI doo-hickey. If you have invites available, and you're replying to someone who does not have a gmail.com address, you get an unobtrusive menu item that lets you invite that person to Gmail. And it's personalized with that person's first name. ("Invite Tekla to join Gmail.")
It's the 2004 Google equivalent of the famously viral 1996 Hotmail .sig.
