Editor's Corner:
From Favored to Fettered: The Undoing of E-Mail

I have been in love with e-mail since 1983. As an early proponent of e-mail marketing, I commandeered campaigns in the 80’s to market home banking, online services, conferences, and publications.. Then I stopped.

The heat, the flack, the nastiness of the gatekeepers became more that I could bear.

Now we’re at the end of the century and opt-in e-mail has its evangelists, vendors and customers. The DMA has embraced the cause. Forrester Research predicts that by 2003 the opt-in e-mail industry will grow to $900 million.

In the meantime a new spammer is born everyday. Even with laws going into place to outlaw such activities, spam will be hard to eradicate. As grassroots sized businesses acquire the technologies that were once privy to larger-sized deep-pocketed businesses, these small companies will seek out their marketplace electronically. The economics of e-mail are irresistible to them.

And no matter how many opt-in lists responsible marketers create, we’re all at the mercy of the spammers. The success of any e-mail campaign will be dependent on how spam-free we can keep our e-mail boxes.

I’ve spoken to many AOL users who have dropped the service because their mailbox was constantly cluttered with junk e-mail. Others "went underground" by creating a new screen name on the same account, leaving the first mailbox to go into cyber-decay.

Right now I still love my e-mail box. But as more and more things start to pile into it that I never asked for, who knows, I might find talking on the phone to be a low tech analog wonder.