RSS to Help Battle Spam
This viewpoint has been around for a while, but it's usually (unfortunately) characterized as "RSS will replace email", which is just silly. But there is a real idea in here: RSS feeds could offer a cure for all of those sites that you register for where you have to give your email address and then uncheck 20 little boxes that try to get you to sign-up for their mailing lists.
I personally would be much more likely to "try out" some of those information feeds if they were presented as RSS becuase I have control. I can unsubscribe without having to rely on the content providers mailing list server, I don't have to give out my email address, and I might find something useful in their feed. I probably won't, but at least I would be exposed to their information instead of never receiving it in the first place.
Anyway, this is one possible (likely?) future for content syndication feeds once the pieces fall into place (ubiquitous readers, a standardized feed:// addressing scheme). This would be a big win.
Here's a nice article that summarizes why this could be a good thing.
Comments
I agree that RSS is a good replacement for solicited bulk email. Another option is NNTP especially on a server like gmane.org which does not expire messages and uses TMDA and SpamAssassin to weed out the spam. Another advantage that RSS and NNTP have over traditional email are permalinks. One of the reasons I now read almost all my mailing lists via NNTP on Gmane.org is if I want to link to a message on my web site, I just look at full headers and grab the URL (and do a little editing) and publish it. This is theoretically possible with email, but mailing lists would need to be available on public IMAP servers and IMAP URLs would need to start being supported (and of course we'd need more better IMAP clients!).
Posted by: Nancy McGough | November 7, 2003 02:26 AM