On Nov 28, 6:30pm, Seth wrote:
}
} > Why? What makes your opinion of what and how email should arrive
} > in your mailbox more valid than Barry's?
}
} It's my mailbox.
I knew you were going to answer literally as soon as I realized I'd
clicked "send" without rephrasing "your mailbox."
s/your/someone's/. Generalize. This discussion isn't (I hope) about
solving the problem for you personally, but in the way that would
best address the needs of the majority.
} I don't want anything shoved under my door to trip me, period. I have
} no problem with them leaving piles of menus in the mail room where I
} can look at them and take one if _I_ feel like it, and they don't get
} in my way when I don't. That's a lot like putting ads on their own web
} site, isn't it?
Actually, no, it's not. Their web site isn't located where you might
happen to wander past twice a day. Ads on their web site are more like
a pile of menus outside their *own* front door.
Besides, piling menus in the mail room hardly differs from shoving them
under your door. If every restaurant in the city left a pile of menus
in your mail room, you'd trip over them just as surely. But you know
that's not going to happen, because both you and the restaurant know
the relative value of a pile of menus in the mail room.
Email is sent because the sender thinks sending it has more value
than not sending it. Your mail room isn't buried in menus because
it's not worth the effort; there's a menu under your door because
someone felt (even if wrongly) that it was worth the effort. Either
way, your preferences didn't enter into it, and the shut-in upstairs
who never visits the mail room might be glad to learn about a new
place to order out delivery. So maybe we should stop asserting that
preferences are all that matters, because even if that should be the
way the world is, clearly it neither is that way, nor headed there.
} But if Amazon already pays, Barry is happy receiving their mail
} because it's paid for. So I concluded that Barry's system would
} require _additional_ payment.
And that led you also to conclude that Amazon would be unwilling to
make that additional payment?
To answer John L's question: Pays an ESP, or pays to license mailing
list management or CRM software, or most likely in Amazon's case pays
a small army of DBAs and programmers and marketers and HTML designers
and MTA administrators. That there's not currently any direct cost
for moving the bits into the recipient mailbox is not evidence that
they'd balk at one.
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