my web 0.2 website

The death of email has already been predicted on approximately 1,258,926 blogs, so I barely need to recount the chant that IM is already replacing regular conversation, social networking manages infrequent messaging between your peers and introduces you to new business partners, and that web forums are how the population now find out information.  Email is struggling to be the ubiquitous gold-standard for internet communication because of the amount of spam and malware that is distributed through the medium.
This doesn’t explain how email marketing will be replaced.  Email is an inexpensive and relatively simple and successful way of driving repeat business.  Once your customers have found your company useful once, you take future opportunities to remind them to spend some money with you again.  If legitimate email marketing dies, this could cause a dent in online trading.  That’s bad for folks like me and the folks who read these articles.

GMTV are finding they’re already a victim of spam filtering, or customer reluctance to read marketing email.  They’re originating messages that either get binned by the audience, or their audience’s automatic spam filters.  Customers who traditionally would have received emails informing them of new online content are now being encouraged to install a desktop client that alerts them in real time about new content.

I’m pretty worried that in order to stay in touch with suppliers in the future, I’ll be expected to use one particular desktop client.  This means in some cases, I may have to use one particular desktop environment for a start.  Secondly, this makes it more likely that I’ll receive malware - how can I trust the originators of the client?  And as it’s a network service, any desktop alerting system is also potentially at risk of abuse or spam.  So I get realtime spam as well as spam waiting for me when I check my mail.

Instead, I hope that more email clients incorporate RSS systems in the future, as Apple Mail has done in the latest release.  Using Apple Mail, I can subscribe to marketing announcements from the companies that I want to hear from, and have those arrive in a specified area of my mail client, and they’re not inflicted by spam.  As I try to make clear everywhere possible - use open standards and open protocols, if you want to keep your doors open to new business.