I have a profound dislike for Newsletters, mostly because I receive too many unwanted ones. Unsubscribing is risky enough, so my current solution is to have a Thunderbird filter that tags the message as spam. Works quite well.

As a business owner, I do have to think about marketing though. I have resisted sending out email Newsletters to-date because that would be quite hypocritical of me. I have been toying with the idea of a rich RSS Newsletter of-late and I think this is the approach I am going to take. RSS Newsletters have significant benefits over traditional email campaigns:

1) 100% permission-based...you don't get to see it unless you consume the feed. None of the quadruple opt-in with triple permission acknowledgement and the kitchen sink required for email.

2) ZERO cost and reliable ... no error-prone sending process using email software that somehow always finds a way to fail.

3) Minimal effort ... create the Newsletter, post it and you are done.

4) General trackability ... no covert email beacons and the like. If someone views it, you know it.

Interestingly enough, I had an email correspondence with Christoph Richner, the creator of the free Raccoom XML framework which I use in all my modules. I respect Chris' development skills as the Raccoom framework is way better than any RSS code I have seen anywhere, including DotNetNuke. I think Chris and I may collaborate on making the Speerio NewsWire module into something quite interesting. One feature that will be in for sure is RSS Newsletters. I will post again once I have more detail.