The question came up on a mailing list about how senders classify email. Steve came up with the following list of email types from the recipient (not sender) perspective
- Transactional & Alerts
- Marketing
- Duplicates
- Duplicates
- Apologies for the preceding duplicate
- Just sending mail so you don’t forget us
- Opt-in confirmations
- Welcome messages
- COI challenges
- Opt-out confirmations
- Apologies and corrections to the broken URL in the preceding email.
- Notifications that we added you to this other list over here, seeing as you’re on this one
- Inscrutable blank messages
- Inscrutable messages that aren’t exactly blank but seem to consist solely of a broken image
- Other apologies, assorted
- Reconfirmations after we got blocked at AOL
- Different reconfirmations while we migrate to a different ESP, ‘cos the last one got blocked at AOL
- Reminders to add us to your address book, especially at AOL
- Cross-marketing for ISPs other than AOL
- Spam
- Mailing to our suppression list by accident
- Viruses
- Not really spam, honest, look, we have an unsub link
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you forgot:
* recipes from grandma
* lame jokes from grandpa
* pictures of my sister’s kid
* invitations to a friend’s party
* surprise greetings from a long-lost classmate
* job offers (real ones)
* …other human-to-human communications, which are the real reason people use email. All this marketing stuff is just a side effect.
Sheesh, JD. You mean that stuff MATTERS?
🙂