[GTALUG] OT: Shots fired - heads up

[ac]

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 06:52:41 -0400
Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org> wrote:
<snip snip>
> For most email these days, "transactional" is an aspiration. Most have
> response rates of single digits at best.
> 
key word : deliverabilty

IF, marketing would have the ability to be delivered in main inbox, response
rates could in fact be in double digits. Most people (yes, even gen z) really
do actually read email in main inbox and do so quite attentively, like you
are doing right now :)

but, the way this works has changed dramatically and the skills to effect
this has become, quite unexpectedly, rare. I think that the people that know
how to achieve this are not doing tiktoks or publishing on youtube. They are
not even writing blogs and it is really not fully explained on google :)

there are so many factors but one of the super obvious factors are: recipients
would have to want to receive the specific marketing - for example, if you are
currently wanting to employ an au pair, you would not frown too much if you
received a cv in main inbox from an actual au pair.

anyway, like I mentioned, emails in main inbox are read and I have personal
experience of 100% read rates :)

> Sure, my spam filter is busier than ever ... but the signal-to-noise ratio
> has plummeted. Same with postal mail. If it wasn't for flyer mail Canada
> Post would be in even more of a financial hole than it now is. Email

Not the same at all? 
On half of planet earth postal mail has died already. 
Also, the majority of post offices globally have already closed down. 

But, email use has been growing and the number of independent email servers
has more than doubled the past 24 months - even as seen on abuse data (btw
many agencies are now releasing much more data. but services like spamcop has
always made some of the data available even in public, here for example:
https://www.spamcop.net/spamstats.shtml )

so even though specific agency reports may be up or may be down, I base my
opinions on cross sections of data from many different agencies and many
hard sources

> marketing does not suffer quite the same financial fate as postal mail
> because costs are shared between sender and receiver.
> 
> In a previous life I was on the other side of this. I was involved in
> choosing a bulk-mailing vendor and launching numerous bulk email campaigns,
> for newsletters and announcements. (FWIW, the vendor we ended up using was
> Moosend, based in London and India -- email doesn't care about domestic
> versus international rates.) It was cheap, but we never expected more than
> low-single-digit percentage of recipients even opening what we sent, let
> alone responding by (say) going to the org's website. Providing strategy to
> circumvent RBLs and spam filters has become a cottage industry of its own.
> 
Yes, and all the above does not work. There is no way to circumvent 2024
abuse systems. (This does not stop even the 2 largest large players, from
trying though) 

Either way, the above has, like you said already, less than even tiny fractions 
of one hundredth of one percent of recipients even knowing about what was 
sent as 90+% will never even receive it and the rest maybe to spam box, best 
case scenario.

Heck, if you are sending a real transactional email from Google it may not
even hit my inbox at this moment.
 
> What interactive functions of email still exist -- mainly the social ones,
> like personal mail and forums such as this -- are mostly the artifacts of
> the generation that grew up on it. Just like I still receive birthday cards
> in the post, but only from relatives older than me.
> 
agreed, this has changed a lot

> These services may very well never die. But both email and non-parcel post
> are destined to continue their ever-further descent into pure nuisance.
>
wow, there are vast differences between non-parcel post and email :)

I hope you stop getting flyers soon! - When I got flyers I used them as
firestarters, so I kinda miss getting flyers as buying newspapers has become 
a challenge in itself and the oil based fire starters just suck on principle :(

and, you are reading this email and it is pure nuisance, just hit
unsubscribe or add me to your twit filter :) 

if you cannot manage your incoming spam lets talk about that?