Wednesday, 02/18/04

Jakob Nielsen's usability research is didactic and preachy, but usually points in the right direction. Here, writing about mailing lists (a subject close to my heart), he hits on a self-evidently true conclusion about how nontechnical users will undermine their own spam filters (emphasis his):

We've also found that users often employ their spam filters to avoid newsletters that they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam. Voila: the newsletter no longer arrives in the inbox.

The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus ISPs might block their delivery to other subscribers. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.

It's not going to be limited to unsubscription orders. Mail geeks have been locked in a Red Queen's race with spammers for years, and to keep up, we attach enormous semantic meaning to spam classification. As soon as modern filters become reliable enough for mainstream adoption, people are going to treat them as killfiles. It's going to cause havoc. It'll be hilarious! But messy. 10:32AM «

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