mediajunk

Microsoft is to allow "well behaved" marketers access to the 170 million regular users of Hotmail and MSN email -- providing they pay a cash bond of up to $20,000, according to a report in The Register. "Microsoft is behind the idea because it wants to reclaim email marketing from criminal spammers ... The downside is that what users think of as spam and what marketeers think of as spam are sometimes two different things. Excluding the get-rich-quick scams and penis pills it's not too long before we get into areas of potential dispute." In fact, there are already gender differences in the interpretation of spam, with women being more receptive than men to "email marketing messages", as I posted a few months ago. As Google gets ready to launch Gmail, the prospect of increased spam/marketing messages/whatever can only be an incentive for Hotmail customers to migrate.