What does 'abuse my attention' mean to you? Is it unsolicited (spam) email, or just any form of marketing/promotion in general? This is an important point to address for startup founders who often rely on obtaining and nurturing attention relationships with their users.
What's interesting is that newsletters would be better-implemented as RSS/Atom feeds... but nobody ever does that. Why? Because nobody would actually subscribe. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
(Again, I'm not saying that spam is ineffective, it is effective. But then again, coming up to me and hitting me on the head and taking my wallet would probably get you the money in my wallet faster than creating a business would.)
Wonder about what? 99% of the population have no idea what an RSS feed is, and the other 1% largely don't use them.
When I get emails, I expect them to be from either friends or from clients. I like my friends enough to want to see the things they send to me ASAP; I want to hear immediately from clients so that I can respond to them at four in the morning (if I'm up anyway, that is). Know who I don't want interrupting my workflow? You.
If you're looking to get my attention because you've got a new feature or you generally just want me to come back to you, then come up with a way to make me want your reminder. Have me become a fan of you on Facebook, so that you can push to my feed. Have me follow you on Twitter. Publish your story to Hacker News, and make sure it's good enough that I'll notice it and check it out again. Get a blog and push your updates to me through RSS. But when you email me, you're being a jackass.
No, it's not. Maybe it was when we didn't have RSS and other "push" systems like Twitter and Facebook to handle people who didn't know who wanted to see their updates but assumed somebody might. Now, however, there is little reason to push content directly to my inbox rather than letting me specify the sorts of things I want there.
I'll put my email address down on a web site if they haven't launched and I want an email notifying me of launch. I think that's a reasonable time to email me. I think it's also a great idea to offer an easy "sign up to have us email you our blog posts" for people who don't have RSS but would still like to benefit from receiving updates. People who release specifically-made-for-email newsletters are either not taking enough advantage of modern methods of online communication, or they're assholes who care more about my seeing their name than they care about whether or not I want to see their name.
I _try_ to use unique email adresses, but it's a bit of a pain so I only end up doing it when I suspect spamminess, perhaps there's an opportunity here, a simplified way to auto generate single vendor/website specific email addresses directly from mail clients. It'd be reasonably easy to do it inside gmail on chrome, but I'd wNt it to work the same from my phone, iPad, laptop, desktop, and webmail. That makes it a bit harder. Perhaps a mail server based scheme where I can bcc a specific address and have the mail server/proxy deal with everything...
No, no they don't. That was pre-facebook - most of those users have moved there now.
Look, I dislike spam as much as the next guy, but being an entitled whiner like you are in this post is beyond ridiculous. If you don't like advertising and businesses trying to sell you stuff, move to North Korea and send me a postcard next Christmas to let us know how you're doing.
It's perfectly reasonable for someone to _not_ want, what consumerism brings them. People who decide they don't like receiving marketing emails - trying to dupe them into making a purchase - shouldn't be required to opt-out of society.
Dude: you chose to let email interrupt your flow. This is simply not how reasonable people use email: most people turn their computer on once a day or two and see if they have any email. When friends want to get a hold of them, they call them on the phone or maybe send a text message.
The question should not be "would you call me with this announcement", it should be "would you send me a piece of snail mail with this announcement". Seriously: when you insist that email be used in this manner /you/ are the person who is being the jackass.
I will also point out that letting friends interrupt you is also ludicrous. "Hey bill: next Thursday I'm thinking of going bowling; want to come?" should not force you to stop everything you are doug and drop out of flow. The next step is that you start going to your friends and yelling at them for forwarding you something they found funny and legitimately thought you would enjoy (and which most of their other friends also enjoyed).
Where does it end? This kind of email addiction is exactly what all of those "how to be happy and effective with your work" books spend most of their time trying to stamp out of you (as people who make their life around business and computers often fall into this trap).
1. You probably don't have a personal relationship with your customers. Don't fake it.
2. Trying to sell your customer something off the back of a message like this is opportune and Machiavellian.
3. If you want an opportunity to sell your customers something - be honest and upfront about it.
At the end of the day, this article is just an advertisement for an email conversation company.