Improving the email interface

Want an improved email interface? Then build it.
There’s been an ongoing discussion about adding thumbs up / thumbs down style buttons to email clients. While I am dubious this is a useful feature or something that recipients will use, if there are others in the industry that think it would be useful then I strongly suggest they go ahead and create it.
In fact, there are a couple things that have been asked for in email interfaces that aren’t currently provided. Last October I blogged about adding an unsubscribe button to email clients.

Now, many email clients have not implemented an unsubscribe button, but I’m told it’s not difficult to write plugins for many common email clients (mail.app, thunderbird, outlook). I think that if a few senders should get together and write the unsubscribe plugins and make them freely available to recipients. If the tools are out there, and the recipients want them, then they’ll be used. There’s nothing stopping senders from creating the tools they want created. Hire a few developers and get it done. You’re the marketers, market the benefit to the recipients to use your tools to improve everyone’s life.

The same thing goes for a thumbs up / thumbs down mechanism. If you write it, and it is useful (and useable) then users will demand that the proprietary interfaces provide the same functionality.
In the blog post I initially made that suggestion one of the comments said

To suggest that email marketers ought to get together and write plug-ins for popular email clients in order to fix the problem misses the point – this is a feature that ought to be a standard part of the software/web interface, as a plug-in it’s subject to vagaries like incompatibilities when the software is upgraded (see how many Firefox plug-ins show errors immediately after an upgrade).

Which shows some gross misunderstanding of how feature development works. Every feature started off with someone saying the mail client needs to do X either because they wanted the feature or because their users were asking for it.
In the case of unsubscribe buttons, or thumbs up/down buttons, end users aren’t currently asking for the functionality. That’s not to say they wouldn’t use it if it was there, just that they aren’t asking for it. The way to get the functionality inserted as a standard part of the software/web interface, is to get users to ask for it. In order to get users to ask for it, the best way to start is to create a plug-in that they like and use. If they like it in their Outlook interface at work, then they’ll ask for it in their webmail interface at home.
Many plug-ins are written by a single coder as a hobby or functionality they wanted or needed for their own mail. This is why there are maintenance failures this is a hobby or labor of love and real life™ interfered in the upkeep or the functionality was no longer needed by the maintainer or any number of reasons. This can trivially be resolved by someone being paid to maintain the plug-in and keeping up with the new versions of mail clients throughout the development cycles.
Is this guaranteed to lead to the email interface improvements senders are asking for? Of course not, nothing is guaranteed. But I can assure you that actually creating the protocols and buttons and interfaces will lead to widespread adoption faster than simply waiting for someone else to do what you want.

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TWSD: My lunch is not spam

My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and ISPs.
Since the poster took the time to link to my blog, I thought I’d take the time to look in detail at his post and talk about how likely it is to work.

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Unsubscribe rates as a measure of engagement.

Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism.

  1. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out.
  2. Most people don’t opt-out.
  3. Therefore, most people want our mail.

This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers, because their unsubscribe rates and complaint rates are very low. The low complaints and unsubscribes must mean their mail is wanted. Unfortunately, the email marketers’ syllogism leads them to faulty conclusions.
There are many reasons people don’t opt-out of mail they don’t want. Some of it may be practical, the mail never hits their inbox, either due to ISP level filters or their own personal filters. Some people take a stance that they do not opt out of mail they did not opt-in to and if they don’t recognize the company, they won’t opt-out.
In any case, low levels of opt-outs or even this-is-spam hits does not mean that recipients want that mail. The sooner marketers figure this out, the better for them and their delivery.

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Suppressing email addresses: it's good for everyone

Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense.
What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some point they’re going to mail someone who gets annoyed enough with them to make it public that they are too incompetent to run an email program.
This happened to the folks over at spamfighter.com recently. They have been spamming Neil Schwartzman (spamfighter, Executive director of CAUCE North America, Director of Standards and Certification at ReturnPath) since somewhere in 2007. Yes, really, 2007. Neil has asked them politely to stop spamming him. He’s explained he’s not actually using their software. They appear to be incapable of running a suppression list, despite telling him 3 times that they have removed his address.
Showing much more restraint than I would have with a sender who couldn’t stop sending me email, Neil gave them years to fix their process before blogging about his experiences. Instead of fixing their broken process they instead responded to his blog post insisting their mail wasn’t spam because they weren’t sending Viagra mail or 3rd party offers.
We can argue about the definition of opt-in, we can argue about whether registration is permission, we can argue about a lot of things, but when the recipients says “stop sending me email” and a sender says “we’ll stop sending you email” and then fails to actually stop sending email I think the recipient is fully justified in calling the email spam. Sorry spamfighter.com, your process is broken and your inability to fix it 2 years after the brokenness was brought to your attention does not give anyone a good impression.
Every email sender should have the ability to stop sending mail to recipients. If that’s not currently possible with your technology, it should be a very high development priority.

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