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Comment by jgilliam | Hacker News Reader

This is gonna send shockwaves through the email marketing industry.

I believe it will have an impact on the email marketing industry. I can see lots of marketer getting worried. I think however that it will have the worst impact on companies that use their lists in a way that annoy users.

If you simply offer a useful service (and I believe I do with the recently launched http://anynewbooks.com) I don't think you are going to be terribly impacted. People will always open emails that they find valuable whether they are newsletters or not.

If all you offer is low quality bacn though, you're going to hate this new Gmail feature.

If you annoy people, chances are that you'll end up in their spam filters anyway. This is for the kind of stuff that people leave in their inboxes to read later (or, if they're organized, auto-forward to some "read later" folder).

Perhaps 'annoy' was too strong of a term. What I meant was the kind of emails that barely interest your users enough not to mark them as spam. Low quality bacn.

What I'm saying is that it's not the death of newsletters. This new feature is really useful and its negative impact on permission based marketing can be reduced by ensuring that the content you send out is really appealing to your users. Which is a win-win situation, because more appealing content usually leads to more conversions.

A high open rate may mean that your newsletter ends up in the high priority inbox for a decent percentage of your user-base, despite being a newsletter (unless Google automatically excludes newsletters).

How long until Google monetizes Priority status?

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