Where Do You Stand?

I spent part of the weekend unsubscribing from all of my e-mail lists. It’s a bold stand, but I’m interested in protecting the sanctity of my inbox. Ideally, all that will reach me via e-mail will be messages from clients, contacts, family and friends and contain information that I need right then and there.

Bill Gates has called e-mail an “interruption technology.” As annoying as telemarkers used to be in the pre-Do Not Call registry era, e-mail notifications distract, consume time better used elsewhere, and clog up my system, making it more difficult to see and find e-mails that are important, and that I really want to read.

In fact, I do want some notifications. I want to know when some sales are, when certain products are available, when events will occur and when the latest pharmaceutical will change my life (OK, I’m kidding about that last one.) So e-mail marketers and webmasters be warned: I’m going all RSS. If you’re not delivering your information so that I can subscribe to it using my RSS feed reader then guess what? I’ve decided to live without it.

My daily routine includes opening my feed reader and reading content sorted by topic, by client or by community group. I read it when I’m ready to absorb the information and keep what’s of interest to me, quickly dispensing with the rest.  In truth, the vast number of e-mails (including e-newsletters) I’ve gotten over the last several years, go largely unread. Why? Because when I get them, I’m doing something else. I file them away with the intent of reading them later and somehow, never get back there. A site with an RSS feed provides all the information I need and want, though. I can subscribe to the feed and if I want to find an article or post from an earlier edition, it’s easy to go to the site, search and find the archived information or additional information I seek. It’s convenient and there when I want it.

To the retailers, organizations, groups, publishers of e-newsletters and others who have been e-mailing me regularly for many a year, goodbye for now, and let me know (using searchable content) when you start offering RSS feeds and I’ll be right there to subscribe.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.