Hurricane alerts sent by Indian River County, Florida was handily tagged as spam by AOL last year. So a sizeable number of people never saw the emails and had to wait to be informed through other means. “Honey, is that the neighbor’s house in our yard?”
Ok, not funny. Which brings me to my point: Email subscriptions and RSS/Atom subscriptions require the same two basic things:
1) A connection to the internet
2) A means to read the message
But the benefits for users begin to diverge…
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Email
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RSS/Atom
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In an email subscription, you ask a server (via your email client) to tell you if anything interesting happens. When something does, you get an email the next time you open your email client.
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In an RSS/Atom subscription, your reader ask a server if anything interesting happened since the last time you asked. If something has, you’ll see it the next time you open your reader.
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Your email message may go through multiple mail relays and get filtered as spam by any number of gateways.
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If you can see the RSS/Atom feed in the first place, you can get the updates. No filtering, no spam.
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Your email address must be provided to subscribe. It may be used for nefarious purposes by anyone gaining access to the mailing list, or renting (pimping) it out.
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The vast majority of feeds require zero personal information. Subscribing is no different than anonymously browsing a webpage.
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Now look at it from the IT side of the fence. As an Emergency info provider you can:
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Provide email subscription forms, maintain mailing lists, send bulk email on demand, and then contact every major email service in the world individually and ask to be removed from their spam lists… after it is too late.
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Drop an RSS or Atom XML file on your webserver and call it a day.
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“Sorry about that, Mr. Smith. You didn’t see our email about the tsunami? Next time look for it after the Nigerian phishing email and before the Viagra supplements.”
Better yet, stop using AOL.
Better yet, get an RSS Reader.
