Over the years, I've subscribed to hundreds of e-mail lists. Like many of my colleagues in the online campaigning world, I subscribe to get a feel for how different organizations handle their online communication strategy. During the US Presidential election in 2008, I was subscribed to more than ever -- and I enjoyed every missive! -- however, when the election was over I unsubscribed, no longer wanting to hear from McCain, Ron Paul, and so on.

A year and eight months passed ... and then, today, I received the e-mail below.

I'm a big fan of e-mail and I work with many organizations to help grow their lists by reducing list attrition (unsubscribes) -- so my first reaction was "this is pretty smart." However, as I had a chance to read further and realize that I'd simply been re-subscribed to the list without permission, I was less enthusiastic. Now, frankly, I'm not the kind to get my knickers in a knot about this kind of thing (as it is easy enough to re-unsubscribe), but I bet that many others would. What do you think? Genius or Spam?

(Click for larger version.)

So, I'm going to call bullshit on the recent Wall Street Journal article titled "Why Email No Longer Rules...". The article's title is striving to be sensational -- and I guess it worked, as I surfed over to check it out -- but, from that point on, it falls flat and doesn't manage to land one good argument in favour of the idea that e-mail is going away any time soon. 

Here are the main points the author tries to make:

• New ways of communicating -- always-on, connected, real-time ways -- are faster and "more fun" than e-mail.

• According to some research by Nielsen Co, more people are using social network sites than e-mail. (Though, I don't see how that is possible, given that most -- if not all -- social network sites require that you supply an e-mail address to sign up.)

• In the "land of the stream" (social networks), there are (or will be) more sophisticated filtering available to help manage the information flow. 

Frankly, I think all three points are bunk. Here are five reasons why e-mail is still the king of Internet applications:

Originally posted on the New Internationalist Tech blog

Over the past several years, I’ve worked with many organizations and campaigns that have seen their e-mail subscriber lists grow dramatically. As these e-mail lists grow past the thousands of subscribers mark and head into the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, new strategies for list management are often required.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Avoiding e-mail list data corruption and – continuing on that theme – I’ll attempt to start documenting some of the approaches that I have explored to keep large lists growing, manageable, and insightful.

This week I’ll focus on making them more manageable.

Okay, I admit it. I’m an inbox junkie. And, If I have to look in more than one electronic inbox, it drives me crazy. Historically, nothing drove me crazier than voice mail… it just refused to behave. So the journey began: first it was eliminating all but one voice mail box; then I began forwarding everything — business, mobile, and home — to that one (voicemail) inbox. But even that wasn’t enough — I still couldn’t manage to remember to dial in for the messages. I tried asking people to e-mail me instead of leaving a voice mail, but that was short-lived. Then I hit on the magic dust: a voice mail transcription service.