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Comment by longnguyen | Hacker News Reader

Hard to say. It's definitely more expensive to send emails, yes. But the upside is well worth it IMO.

For example, some services allow you to send content at a specific time based on audience's timezone. This increases open rate.

Or you can choose to resend the same email to audience who haven't opened the first time.

This could boost sales.

I'm not sure RSS can achieve that (there might be solution I don't know about)

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I was recently sent a message that I was going to be unsubscribed from a list because they thought I hadn't opened my emails. I did read the emails but just don't allow tracking pixels.

At first I thought it was nice of them to unsubscribe me, but then I realized that they are probably doing it because keeping me on their list makes their stats worse since I don't allow them to track me.

On the other hand, users who prefer RSS can consume emails in much the same fashion, by auto-filtering into separate folders, or by using one of the existing email-to-RSS tools. For users, RSS and email are both fine in the sense that users can always convert one into the other, depending on their preferences.

>Or you can choose to resend the same email to audience who haven't opened the first time.

I know there used to be tricks to find out whether an email was opened. But my impression was that Gmail and others prevent this nowdays?

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