E-Media Tidbits

Randy Cassingham, who publishes a weekly humorous-news e-newsletter called This Is True, bemoans the slow ("QUITE slow") growth of his enterprise. His subscriber base is still growing -- last week's issue went out to more than 117,000 subscribers -- but it's sluggish because of lost accounts due to bouncing e-mail addresses and "spam filters that don't know the difference between actual spam and something people signed up to purposefully receive," he wrote in last week's newsletter.

As a way to fight back against what spam filters are doing to his business, Cassingham has added an RSS feed for This Is True (all the content of True's free edition -- not just the headlines). RSS (which means "Rich Site Summary," and often is called "Really Simple Syndication") is becoming increasingly popular among online publishers, and it's particularly significant for e-mail publishers who are getting hit hard by dumb spam filters. (I use the word "dumb" to imply that they are not yet smart enough to determine if a piece of bulk e-mail is unsolicited or asked-for.) For Cassingham, offering RSS gives him an additional way to reach readers without e-mail filters getting in the way or having them remember to visit a website. As spam filters do additional damage to ethical e-mail publishers, perhaps RSS will save the day -- but first the web masses need to catch on to using RSS readers. That will take a little while.