This is how I handle “whitelisting” (example for Gmail)

It works for now, and if the spammers work around it, I will just make it a little more specific by using specific information within the headers, or part of the unsubscription notification.

Proprietary Concept: Unique key to prevent spam filtering
To be quite honest, a service like Aweber or Getresponse should be able to add a unique key that is specific to my email address, such as using a base64 encoding with a seed, that would make it impossible for a spammer to replicate, and a 100% guaranteed way I could whitelist all emails they send me forever.
I am licensing my whitelisting key solution under GNU FDL so if anyone tries to patent this idea they get to fight the legal battle.

The following is an example for Aweber mailing lists, but you can do the same for Getresponse, iContact, Feedblitz, Mailchimp etc.

Don’t listen to any service that thinks their delivery rate is so good that you don’t need to whitelist in some way.

This filter method has pulled over 100 emails out of the spam folder of Gmail for me in the last week.

After you have this set up, any emails that might otherwise have gone to spam will have this at the top

I won’t say no to free unlimited email services for solving your delivery problems forever

This example is based around Gmail, but I am sure other services have a way to create filters to prevent things going in spam that override other things.

If all email you asked for made it into your email box, would you have time to read it?

Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn’t really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog’s dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don’t offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn’t always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don’t currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn’t managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don’t think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn’t have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn’t it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

http://www.viraloptingenerator.com/index.php

This script is different to Optin Accelerator in a number of ways

• The script is hosted 100% on your server
• No subscription fee
• It doesn’t “send home” any date, so it is 100% your responsibility

In theory that makes it almost exactly the same as the scripts used by the big boys of Web2.0 though their servers are less likely to conk out the first time someone with 200 contacts in Gmail uses the script if you are on shared or even most reseller hosting. You would probably have problems on most virtual servers as well.
I don’t know if the service can be configured to use a 3rd party SMTP, whether it uses sendmail, phpmailer, or swiftmailer.

If you are a smart programmer, picking this up might give you a few ideas, but remember

• It is still against the published ToS of Aweber
• You are still encouraging people to do something that is unsafe if running an internet business
• Legal liability – it is you sending the emails – in some ways I would be worried about the claims on the sales letter that it doesn’t keep a record – if you are sending emails there is always a record somewhere, though you are best advised to keep a record of every email you send anywhere.
• The script needs to be maintained for updates – maybe it will be updated over time, but best to allow for programming time to keep it working.
• The Plaxo option is free, and maybe safer

I have thought a little more about the suggestion Aweber make about forwarding emails – that is actually unsafe for most email lists, because many readers will also forward unsubscription information. What happens if they forward it when you are price testing? Forwarding effectively encourages public posting.
Maybe it is better to mail the person sending when they use a standard TAF with a letter encouraging they forward that to friends and also the message that goes to their friends.

It is still TAF though, so check with your email service provider.

• It took a long time for internet marketers to copy the viral signup mechanisms used by many internet startups, including the more established Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace etc.
• It is a massive business security risk
• People are going to buy it and use it and their customers are going to face the risk
• Some of my subscribers might damage their business either by using it for one of their sites, or giving their account access away.

Now I hoped that as soon as people realised it was a bad idea despite having massive viral potential, the product would be pulled.

Currently it looks like the site has been closed – I have high regards for Reed Floren and Matt Haslem who launched it, so I am assuming it is off the market.

That being said, I have seen a few people using it still – if it is just limited circulation, some people need to be a little careful.

So where did they go wrong?

What Did Optin Accelerator Do?

Quite simply you hand over your login information to your primary email account, and it scrapes addresses so you can send an email to all your friends about a new service you have found, or product.
Yes… exactly the same process as is used by many Web2.0 sites, but you don’t have to worry about the technical details of how things work, because the script is on their servers, and calls home.

This means that your subscribers are sharing their personal login information to their email account with a 3rd party just to promote your product.
The big guys are generally using 1st party scripting, still risky but at least you know who has your data (I would never use it though)

Robert Plank has gone into that aspect of Optin Accelerator in some depth

Here is part of the comment I left on his blog post

Google has unified login, so does Yahoo and MSN.

By handing over login information, you are hading over not only your email (which could be full of important passwords for affiliate accounts) but also providing access to Adsense, Adwords, Google Analytics, Google AppEngine (if you are a geek)

It would also allow someone to reset every password you have which sends resent information to your emil, such as all your wordpress blogs, hosting etc.

Handing over this information is throwing your whole internet business into turmoil.

Would you want to encourage your own subscribers to do that?

Robert has actually gone through all the terms of service of each of the large online email services, and it seems handing over your account details is breaking their terms and conditions. How the hell do the big guys get away with such a security risk?

If that isn’t bad enough, it has been determined

• It is against Aweber’s terms of service (as are all tell-a-friend scripts) – that being said, I know people who use tell-a-friend scripts who primarily use Aweber – I have no idea how they get away with that.
  A guy in Robert’s comments (Craig) posted a response from Aweber

  Thank you very mush for bringing this to our attention. We have taken action to contact the owners of that product.

  Please understand that this was done without our consent, and will be fully addressed. We take many steps here to ensure your deliverability, including monitoring the use of customer accounts, so that even should someone use this type of program without our consent, we would remove them from the service.

  Thank you again for bringing this to light. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to let me know.

  Regards,
  Tracey Churray
  Director Of Customer Solutions

• Most hosting affiliates use would have problems handling the emails being sent, unless they are using SMTP through Gmail for instance
• If it is a really good product, shouldn’t you be promoting it as an affiliate?
• Melody from Women’s Net also mentioned the possibility of liability
• Plaxo provide fwidget for free that could be integrated to achieve effectively the same – that is slightly less risky (suggested by David L. Cross)
• Randolf Smith goes into the nature of email address books (all those friends and family) – how many are really interested in a specific product? Also as an affiliate, why would you promote something for free? At least Tell-A-Friend scripts often pass on your affiliate links, but that only works down one level – if it is really good, isn’t promoting to your list or blog readers better?

People You Know vs Sending Email

If you are going to use one of these scripts, it is much better to use the export and import contact list options often provided.
If there isn’t anything provided, you can also create a new email account just for importing contacts which has no private information.

I can see a real reason to find people you already know on a service – maybe services should be using the MyBlogLog API in a smart way.

If your service encourages every person who joins to send out 100s of emails, it becomes spam even if it technically isn’t if they are personal contacts, and you are doing it in a non-professional capacity.

This means that they totally blow Feedburner Email subscription away as far as features are concerned.

Apart from one important aspect.

Exclusive: Aweber Will Soon Report Email Sububscriber Numbers To Feedburner

In the announcement Justin Premick mentioned

This is just one of a number of enhancements we’ll be making to the Blog Broadcast tool. Stay tuned…

I probed a little deeper and we can expect to have counts reported to Feedburner in the near future, but no specific time frame.

What Does This Mean To The Blogosphere?

Internet marketers who concentrate on email subscriptions from their blog using Aweber will soon be able to benefit from the same social proof as if they were RSS subscribers. I know a few marketers that previously only had a few thousand RSS subscribers who will suddenly be propelled into similar subscriber counts as… Techcrunch 600k+

I think that shakes public perception up a little

A Confession About Feedblitz

Feedblitz also have this capability and a bunch of cool features, and I exchanged emails with Phil Hollows 1st December after an exchange of comments both here in the past, and on Problogger.
There seem to be a number of ways that Feedblitz could meet my needs for email in the same or similar way to Aweber, though it might take a little work with existing scripts

I really need to spend some time on full evaluation, but my house move and subsequent lack or intermittent connectivity has disrupted my workflow.

Volusion Now Integrates With Aweber

This was one of the problems I had with Volusion as a solution. Their own email system is primarily for sales notices, and once you grow a subscriber list beyond a certain number of users, they recommended moving over to using Intellicontact.

I wasn’t very happy with the Intellicontact pricing, but an even bigger concern is that I doubt anyone running their mailing lists with Aweber would even give a second’s thought of moving over to Intellicontact just to use Volusion as a shopping cart.
Your mailing list is your biggest asset, and you don’t move them around because of the need for list members to re-optin with most services.

Maybe my review helped nudge things in a positive direction, as Aweber a few days ago announced Volusion integration with Aweber.

Major Bandwidth Concern Not Addressed

For me it is the bandwidth – I am sure many sites are quite willing to pay $10 per 1GB of bandwidth, but if I was running this blog on Volusion currently, along with a shopping cart I would have to go for one of their Semi-dedicated Premium servers at $499 per month.

This blog at the time of the review was using 9GB of bandwidth per month, and it is now closer to 50 GB – that is with only between 1000 and 2000 daily visitors, and my feeds are handled by Feedburner.

There are ways to offload bandwidth use to other services such as Amazon S3, but note I don’t host large downloads currently, no audio or video, just a few images.

You could also possibly just run the shopping cart on a subdomain, and have the main website hosted elsewhere – not perfect for SEO but viable.

If you have a reasonable cost of goods and profit margin on each sale, bandwidth costs may not be a deciding factor.

Volusion Review Back In Google

I reported 6 weeks ago that for some reason for a period of maybe 2 months my review of Volusion had disappeared from Google search results although it remained on a tag page.

I am please to report that it is back in the index, although link attribution might not yet be accounted for.

I don’t like speculating about purchases too much, but this one actually intrigued me, because there were a number of options.

I was going to post a nice short list something along the lines of

5. Splashpress Media – PayPerPost have been looking to get into some higher profile blogs for some time, and this would be one option
4. B5 Media – For a similar reason, but B5 have funding, and I doubt would be looking to cash out too soon for the sums possibly available
3. Clicky – PPP were in the market for tracking in the past, and Performancing fell though – then not long ago Performancing first of all started using clicking for their service, then dropped it.
2. Blogcatalog – I know VC Dan was very interested in MyBlogLog, and Blog Catalog has a lot of potential

So who is left?

I have got to know Dan Rua quite well from various discussions about PayPerPost and disclosure, and Dan is one of the main driving forces behind PayPerPost as a primary investor.
He is a very smart “guiding hand”, thus I came up with one overwhelming argument.

Dan wouldn’t advise on a purchase of a product unless he tried the service himself.

So my first stop was his Venture Capital blog.

I do read Dan’s blog, and there were no mentions of him testing out any new products. He did write a fair amount about MyBlogLog in the past, even though he wasn’t an investor, thus I expected some kind of mention of a service if he was testing it.
So I took a look at his sidebar.

Zookoda thus became a contender, but there had to be business reasons for the purchase, and they were easy enough to find.

1. Zookoda have been advertising with PayPerPost heavily, in fact I would think one of their biggest cost centres is advertsing with PayPerPost.
2. Zookoda offer a free service and have been promising a method of monetization for some time. Just like Google and Feedburner, their offer of monetization and the cut of the advertising revenue would allow them to continue offering a free service. Most publishers would jump at the chance of more revenue
3. Zookoda needed an advertising sales team – PayPerPost has an advertising sales team
4. Text Link Ads offers Feedvertiser, and also has ReviewMe. PayPerPost is similar to ReviewMe, but more mass market. With advertising sales in Feeds an established marketplace, and PayPerPost already an established player in blog monetization, it is no great shock that they might try to offer more monetization options.

Whilst I could have written the above a couple of days ago, I wanted it confirmed, so I popped off an email to Dan. It was obvious the announcement was being orchestrated, and whilst I could maybe have gained a few extra page views, it might have upset the apple cart.

Dan didn’t get back to me until a couple of hours ago.

Nice work Andy…I can’t believe you leaked it ;-)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/23/payperpost-acquires-zookoda/

Here are some of the things that Zookoda need to fix:-

• Feed Stats – they need to work together with Feedburner to report feed usage – if they do this already, they really need to make that information obvious.
  In some ways they are now a Feedburner competitor, which might make this a little complicated. If it doesn’t happen, I expect to see PayPerPost/Zookoda move into the feed syndication and statistics business extremely quickly.
• Legal Disclosure – One of the interesting shortcomings of Feedburner, and one which I have pushed/encouraged them about in the past, is how poor Feedburner is for CAN-SPAM compliance, and meeting UK/European regulations. I think we will soon see disclosure options for email and feeds available from PPP / Zookoda
• Affiliate Program – This is something that relates to PPP as well – I would love to see some recurring income.
  Both Feedburner and Zookoda are currently lucky to not have disturbed sleeping giants such as Aweber and GetResponse, who both offer rather rudimentary services for bloggers, which don’t offer the important “social proof” of Feedcounters that I have mentioned in-depth in the past. One caveat though – do some work on the landing pages – I have removed the “Review My Post” button on this site because it wasn’t converting, and in my opinion is confusing for a person who first comes across it.
• Comment Subscriptions – I don’t like serving them from my own domain, and they could easily be monetized. I currently use an SMTP plugin, and use Gmail as a SMTP gateway.
  I have a number of teething problems with my email subscription plugin – it isn’t as reliable as it could be and seems to drop people who requested to subscribe. I would love to see an alternative service. Lots of big blogs do not offer comment subscription, I don’t know why. Current options for following discussion are not ideal. It could be monetised
• Delivery Rates – In the Email marketing world, delivery rate of email is looked on as important. If you are offering RSS to Email services, for some reason this doesn’t seem important. Maybe blog content has a 100% delivery rate due to trust, but I would love to see some figures.
• Migrations – How would I move to Zookoda from Feedburner? Obviously I would want to have the ability to have my stats merged, or have some kind of full service.
• Aggregated Feeds – I would love some way to provide multiple feeds on a blog, and to then supply aggregated subscriber counts

I am actually excited about the Zookoda purchase by PayPerPost. In some ways I am surprised that someone didn’t pick up the site earlier. That being said, 10,000 customers isn’t a lot compared to the 500,000 customers Getresponse have, I don’t think Aweber quote customer numbers.
In some ways good technology is important, but 500,000 customers paying a monthly subscription allows a huge budget to develop services.

WordPress SEO Tips & Hacks

Subscribe to Comments Hacks – I am including this at the top of the list because it is highly important. Emails sent out from your domain could cause you problems with email delivery or spam complaints, and the plugin by default doesn’t comply with CAN-SPAM if you or someone else (a spammer) includes a marketing message in your emails.
The danger of overloading your server with emails being sent faster than your host allows is also worth thinking about. I know multiple blogs that have problems delivering all subscribed comments and I am sure the owners are not aware of this.

Just imagine you have 20 people comment on a post, and then you get 5 new comments in the space of one hour – that would put you over the limit on most shared hosting.

Mine are set up to be delivered by Gmail by SMTP – which email host is going to block Gmail totally?

Spam Karma latest release, and I also speculated that I get less spam using it than if I was using Akismet.

My Ultimate List of Dofollow Plugins first published in February still gains links on a daily basis, and has helped convert 100s of people into removing nofollow from their comments and trackbacks.
I have a followup project planned that I will launch within the next week that will provide a way of highlighting blogs that wish to be highlighted as supporting DoFollow.
The page also now includes information on how to remove NoFollow from blogs using Blogger and I hope to be able to include detailed Typepad and MoveableType instructions (I know of 3 people working on this)

How linking to social media and bookmarking sites could affect your search engine performance. The discussion that followed on is just as informative as the post.

Tagging and How Tagging Can Help SEO is one of the primary topics of this blog. I have written a lot of posts regarding the benefits of using Ultimate Tag Warrior (that is a link to the tag).
My analysis of the Google BlogSearch Patent didn’t gain a lot of links from SEO blogs, but then most SEO bloggers don’t understand the benefits of tagging and are too worried about duplicate content (another tag link)

Do you get linked to by the press? I also highlighted how bad some press agencies are with linking.

My attack on Top Commenters plugins caused some uproar. It is great to provide a way to thank the people who comment on your blog, but I prefer to do that by using DoFollow.
If you can understand my milk bottle analogy, you will go a long way to improving the SEO profile of your blog. If you do use a Top Commenters plugin, at least include it using some WordPress logic functions such as is_home() and is_single()

Top WordPress Plugins

I will be opening up the voting for the first round of my cash donations for best wordpress plugins later today (I need to decide which plugin or service to use). I am giving away real money in large chunks to help support WordPress Plugin Development.

Monetization & Blogging Tips

Warning about using Amazon Contextual Links

PayPerPost vs Jason Calacanis turned into an in depth discussion regarding ThisNext vs PayPerPost on Disclosure (you really have to read the comments)

Performancing Metrics Is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing for Niche Website owners and why I recommend Clicky instead.

I write a lot about disclosure in affiliate marketing and blogging. Whilst PayPerPost is constantly being highlighted, the people doing the highlighting are actually as guilty of poor disclosure and unethical practices themselves.

Maki asked a number of bloggers why they display a feed counter and I gave what I believe is the most in depth answer. There are some good tips there for those people who already have an existing mailing list to jumpstart their blog subscription for an insane amount of social proof.
Why don’t Aweber and Getresponse offer a decent email subscription to RSS feeds that reports numbers to Feedburner? Anyone who uses their services misses out on the social proof benefit.
They should also offer their own social proof icons for email subscriptions.

In some ways I hate product launch formula style marketing of services. The scarcity factor makes it hard for a potential buyer to make an informed decision despite all the proof.
Sometimes the materials left over are of huge value, and I recommend you watch the videos from Rich Schefren.

Product Reviews

Stampede Traffic

Sponsored Reviews – with this service you can negotiate with me for paid reviews :)

Volusion Shopping Cart – was I too harsh on them?
Auction Ads

Web 2.0

Is this the Future of MyBlogLog when we finally get an API? Smart internet marketers should already be planning on how the data could be best integrated into other applications.

Tips on using Reddit and Stumbleupon. The StumbleUpon post lists my membership details to a number of social networks… lets be friends. I really should include those in my sidebar.

Sometimes it is amazing the knock-on effect of what you blog about.

My How To Use MyBlogLog post sent Cord some traffic, but the important factor is the quality of traffic sent. Eric from MyBlogLog saw the post, read Cord’s 2 part guide, and then listed it on the MyBlogLog blog, along with some more tips.

I wrote a fair amount about Twitter, partially because it was the talk of the blogosphere, and partially because as with all emerging technology, there were a lot of ethical problems in using it for commercial use. The best way to read full coverage is to use my Twitter tag.

I love Technorati, but they really have problems coping with all the new kinds of RSS and micro blog services such as Twitter, and co.Comment

I had some Digg success earlier in the month, with a story I submitted to Digg actually reaching the front page. The discussion is well worth reading with some insight from Michel Fortin and others.

I have always been attracted to the Subscribe-to-Comments plugin, but at the same time installing it has always filled me with dread. Whilst it can be a great community building aid, and a useful tool for regular visitors who like to interact, it can be a liability.

There are 2 aspects of subscribe to comments that present a danger to a successful business blog

• Email Flow Control
• Legal compliance with CAN SPAM and SI (3429 of 2006)

Email Flow Control

By default, the wp_mail() function of WordPress uses PHPs mail() function, a way of sending instant emails from your server. Unfortunately, most popular hosts have restrictions on how many emails can be sent from your server over 24hrs, and it is very typical for there to be an hourly limit as well.
As an example, here are the Hostgator policy for email delivery:-

There is a 200 hourly email limit per domain this limit is also applied towards mailman. If you send over this amount in any hour most of the e-mails will bounce back with a undeliverable error.

They also suggest one email every 6 seconds – unfortunately if 50 people have subscribed to comments, one new comment sends 50 emails out, which in my opinion is quite worrying.

Most hosts have PHPMailer installed, or available for installation, and you could try your luck using wpPHPmailer plugin, though this seems to be unsupported these days (1 year+ and no reply from developer in the support thread) – support for PHPMailer has actually just been added to WPMU. PHPmailer itself hasn’t been updated in a long time, thus I am slightly hesitant to use it, though I am not technical enough to give a reason for my pessimistic stance.

Swift Mailer & the ShiftThis SMTP Mailer Plugin are the alternative that we are going to use instead, and both are actively supported.

ShiftThis SMTP Mailer Plugin

Installing this plugin is actually extremely easy, as long as you don’t disappear off in the wrong direction. The plugin comes with Swift Mailer already in a sub-folder.
You don’t need to visit the Swift Mailer site at all. If you are not extremely technical, you could waste hours, if not days digging around the Swift Mailer site, and then the the various testing applications. None of that is needed.

Installation:

Download plugin
Extract plugin
Copy / Upload to your normal plugin folder

Configuration:

You could set it up to use your local SMTP server – that would then however count towards how many emails you are sending from your domain, which might not be an ideal situation.

You could also set things up to use Gmail – I can actually think of all kinds of benefits to using Gmail for your SMTP, though if a site is a company site, you might want to use one of the upgraded Google offerings. Also take a look at this old Lifehacker article. You will also have to decide whether you really want your sent email within Gmail to fill up with comments being posted to your blog.

Currently the code doesn’t seem to support the email flow control plugin of Swift Mailer, but if you are using Gmail for SMTP this might not be a problem. I have submitted a message on the support forums to see if this can be integrated with some easy to understand flow controls.

Legal compliance with CAN SPAM and SI (3429 of 2006)

I should note:-

• I am not a lawyer, and the wording I have used was not written by a lawyer
• You should check with your legal consultant and this is provided for entertainment purposes only

No matter how effective your spam controls and how restrictive your comments policy, commercial email messages can get through, and a subscribed email recipient could just as easily claim “this is spam” for a comment subscription as they would for a mailing list.

It is quite common for people engaged in internet marketing to use an email service such as Get Response or Aweber to ensure delivery of their emails, and to protect against spam complaints.

This solution isn’t necessarily going to help with email delivery, but at least offer some “cover your a$$” protection should you happen to receive a complaint.

Whilst elsewhere I have been challenged to provide conclusive proof that you should take precautions with any aspect of your email usage, I am not going to offer that in this write up.
You may well look on this as scare tactics and FUD.

It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
I honestly don’t know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don’t know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

Subscribe To Comments Hack

This is just a hack. I decided to offer a hack for those concerned and don’t intend to offer a patched file. Ideally Subscribe To Comments should offer an interface in the options to allow various additional messages to be added to outgoing email messages. This wouldn’t necessarily just have to be legal information, it could also include additional advertising.

Around line 600 I have added the following:-

[PHP]
$message .= __(“\n\nWarning: Emails generated from comment subscriptions may contain commercial messages. Whilst every attempt has been taken to eliminate comment spam, the content should not be regarded as approved by the blog owner\n”, ‘subscribe-to-comments’);
$message .= __(“Keedz Ltd – Registered in England & Wales: 05906883\n”, ‘subscribe-to-comments’);
$message .= __(“Registered Address: 71 Bexley High St, Bexley, Kent DA5 1AA +48(62)7382438\n”, ‘subscribe-to-comments’);
[/PHP]

Conclusion

As stated this is all for entertainment purposes.

If you are concerned with emails being sent out from your blog, and how they are controlled, making these changes might take you anywhere from 1 to 2 hours. Once you get the hang of it, making the changes on multiple blogs will take just a few minutes, especially if you create a hacked version of the plugin that is suitable for all your web properties.

My own personal belief is it is worth dotting the legal “i”s, and crossing the “t”s if you are serious about your online business. I still have a few I need to handle.

Maybe one day the email mailing list services will offer a host of additional services for bloggers, including adding commenters to mailing lists and providing a safe, monitored email gateway.

A private subscription service for text, audio and video content, even involving a paid subscription fee has been possible for more than a year, based upon RSS.

In a recent podcast Robert Scobles interviewed the Google Reader team, where they made clear that from the start, one of the primary features of Google Reader was the sharing of your private RSS feeds. This is with total disregard for the intended private use of the RSS content.

Some background

For years email marketing has been plagued by spam filters. Whilst they become more accurate in detecting spam content, and allow requested content to be delivered, to effectively use email for marketing, and in some cases even personal messages, you would have to use an email service such as Aweber or Getresponse to ensure your content was delivered.
RSS guarantees 100% deliverability, and because of the way RSS is delivered, it is possible to include rich multimedia content within the messages. Delivering HTML email currently is much harder than text, and there are multiple compatibility problems with different email clients, both offline and online.
RSS will soon become integrated within our daily working environments, as an equivalent to email within Windows Vista, and online applications such as Gmail and their Google Reader.

RSS Technology being Destroyed

(before it has a chance to succeed)

One good example is Feed Magic. I have been a supporter of Feed Magic for more than a year, I own a license for the script itself, and a subscription to the service.

I am an affiliate for the product, and if you decide to purchase their product, I will recieve compensation. But that is not the primary reason for this post.

But can I effectively use them as intended?

Increasingly the answer is an unfortunate… no!

I can’t use what I paid for effectively, and that is the primary reason for this post.

The more indiscriminate sharing of RSS is being encouraged, the less chance break-through technology (that would revolutionise the delivery of marketing messages and vital support information) has of succeeding.

The Google representitives in the podcast actively encouraged the sharing of linkblogs.

I freely admit that the potential of Feed Magic is in its future. It has so much potential.

It should be noted that the RSS options provided by Aweber and Getresponse are nowhere near as advanced as Feedmagic. You could achieve their RSS features just by feeding your own blog with the content from your autoresponder by email.

RSS is subscribing to content you want. There is no way to spam your RSS box. If you decide you don’t want the content, you can unsubscribe.

So Google in part, with their Google Reader and very clear philosophy in the design of the service, are destroying something that could defeat email spam forever… the potential of RSS.

Robert Scoble had the opportunity to discuss this situation with the Google Reader team. Notice when he commented to my post on Google Reader (I assume he read it, and my reply)

Robert is also still sharing content of his linkblog, without asking the owner of the content permission.

This is just one example of how great web 2.0 software can actually harm rather than promote.

Edit: The Feedmagic site was discontinued – some of the technology might have ended up in Nanacast.