How to deal with arbitrary feed subscribers?

One of the fastest ways of getting feed subscribers is by offering RSS-to-Email subscriptions in your blog. This gives visitors a way to get updates from your blog even if they’re not familiar with feed readers like Bloglines, Netvibes or FeedDemon. However, this option also opens you to accidental or arbitrary subscribers.

More and more bloggers are pimping the “Subscribe to my feeds via Email” banner knowing that this is where a huge portion of the subscribers come from. This is more evident with blogs that are not tech-related as the target readers may not be familiar with feed readers, thus email subscription takes the center stage.

The problem though is that these visitors may not really wanted to get email alerts from your blog on a regular basis. There are several cases I’ve encountered this:

• A casual visitor subscribes to your RSS-2-Email feeds because a specific post attracted them. I got a lot of this when visitors subscribing to my email alerts after visiting my “Mel & Joey” post about making money blogging. They would then expect that all succeeding posts would be about problogging or making money online.
• Some visitors just cannot cope up with daily updates from this blog. If a visitor subscribes via email, he or she will get emails from YugaTech on a daily basis since I’m updating everyday. For a casual email user, this may be too much to fill their inbox.
• Others are just oblivious about email subscriptions. They’d reply back to an email feed delivery asking why they’re getting such emails from me. I really wonder how they’d end up in my subscription so I always tell them that email subscriptions are not effected unless they actually activate and verify it from their email.

When a subscriber emails asking why they get emails from me, wanted updates about a specific topic only or asking why on hell they’re getting updates they aren’t interested, I always do any of the ff.:

• Apologize and explain how email subscription works. Also explain to them how my updates may have reached their inbox or that they may have accidentally activated the subscriptions.
• Point out the disclaimer at the bottom/footer of each email delivery and direct them to a link there where they are asked to click if they want to unsubscribe.
• Manually un-subscribe them from email delivery and clarify that the entire email subscription cycle was done by them and this should not happen if they’d read the fine print before typing in their email address inside the blank box.

In hindsight, these type of incidents only shows that some people don’t really read stuff on the internet carefully. What’s more surprising is that they easily give away their email address without knowing what’s in store for them. Guess that’s why email spam is still a huge problem.