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Zookoda’s mother was a hamster!

Friday, 25 January 2008 email rant

Zookoda, the RSS to email republishers have been spamming me since a newsletter I was subscribed to closed down. I’ve complained several times yet the junk keeps coming. Not on my watch.

Now, this is a rant so just understand that before anybody reading this takes it too seriously. That said, what they’re doing is completely avoidable, completely unacceptable and now they’re filling up my inbox, I’m blowing a nut.

Zookoda are, to use their words, “a leading Blog Broadcasting Service provider”:

Zookoda allows blog owners to proactively drive readership, exposure and traffic by sending blog summaries via email. Zookoda provides blog owners with the tools to manage their mailing lists, design their emails, broadcast blog summaries and track recipient usage.

I feel I could summarise that more accurately and more succinctly with: Zookoda is powered by idiots.

I signed up with Zookoda to subscribe to a friend’s blog posts. I’m on Steve’s RSS feed too but I subscribed to the newsletter because of a competition he ran and so I could see how good the service was.

It all went well and it served it’s purpose for 11 months. But Steve decided to use the built-in Dreamhost module instead:

The Seopher.com newsletter that you subscribed to once upon a time has moved. To start receiving updates by email again please subscribe to the RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeopherRssFeed.

Or visit http://www.seopher.com/subscribe.php to subscribe to email updates.

Well that’s all fine but what would you expect Zookoda to do with your email account at this point? Throw it away? That’s what they should do. Keep it but don’t use it? That would be a-okay with me…

What I didn’t expect was to suddenly find myself subscribed to dozens of seemingly random newsletters. Among the hoards, I’ve had Portuguese evangelists, out-of-date PDA news, travel information for Australia and a Spanish food and restaurant reviews.

I’ve sent emails to Zookoda through their unsubscribe link and their abuse centre and I’m about to squeeze out a steamer and float it towards their hosts, detailing their many email offences. In short, if you have the option to subscribe to an RSS feed through Zookoda, can I please suggest you don’t.

Good day to you.