This post was significantly updated in 2026 to reflect new information. An archived version from 2006 is available for reference here.
There is a moment in the life cycle of every growing company when someone in a meeting says, “We need to reach more people.” What follows that sentence determines whether the company earns trust or destroys it. In 2006, FeedBurner, a service that many bloggers genuinely loved, made the decision to send unsolicited bulk emails to bloggers encouraging them to use the platform.
The emails were clearly commercial, had no opt-in mechanism, no unsubscribe option, and no explanation of how the recipient’s address was obtained. It was, by most accepted definitions, spam. Nearly two decades later, the underlying tension remains deeply relevant.
The line between outreach and intrusion is one that bloggers, SaaS companies, and digital publishers still struggle to walk. And how you approach it says something fundamental about the kind of business you are building.
What Made the FeedBurner Email Spam
FeedBurner’s email was polished. It was professional. It even offered a genuinely useful service. But none of that mattered. The email was unsolicited, meaning the recipients never asked to receive it. It was sent in bulk, meaning it was not a personal outreach from one human to another. And it promoted a commercial product, including paid premium features and advertising services.
By any reasonable standard, including the widely accepted definition of UBE (unsolicited bulk email), this was spam. It didn’t matter that the content was relevant to the recipient’s interests. It didn’t matter that FeedBurner was a respected brand. The absence of consent was the problem, not the quality of the pitch.
At the time, some voices defended the email as “legitimate direct marketing,” arguing that spam only referred to pharmaceutical scams and counterfeit software ads. This is a convenient but flawed definition. Spam is not defined by the sleaziness of its content. It is defined by the absence of permission. The moment you send a commercial message to someone who did not ask for it, you have crossed the line, regardless of how polished or relevant that message might be.
What made the situation worse was the response. FeedBurner executives issued what could generously be described as vague apologies. There was no clear acknowledgment that the practice was wrong in principle. The impression left behind was that the company felt the strategy was worth trying and that the backlash was simply an unexpected cost. That attitude eroded trust among the very audience FeedBurner depended on.
Why This Still Matters for Digital Publishers
You might think this is ancient history. FeedBurner was eventually acquired by Google, RSS culture shifted, and the email marketing landscape has matured considerably. But the core dynamic at play here, the temptation to trade trust for reach, has not gone away. If anything, it has intensified.
Today’s bloggers and digital publishers face a version of this problem from every direction. Cold DM campaigns on Twitter and LinkedIn. Unsolicited pitches in blog comment sections. AI-generated outreach emails that arrive with a thin veneer of personalization but are obviously automated. According to Email Tool Tester, nearly 46% of all emails sent globally are classified as spam. The volume has grown, and the sophistication has increased, but the ethical question remains the same.
For bloggers and creators running their own platforms, this matters on two levels. First, as potential targets of unsolicited outreach, understanding what spam is helps you recognize and filter it. Second, and more importantly, as people who build audiences, you need to hold yourself to a higher standard when it comes to how you reach new readers, subscribers, and customers.
The FeedBurner case is a clean example of what happens when a company treats its audience as a list to be acquired rather than a community to be earned. That distinction is not just ethical. It is strategic.
The Strategic Cost of Cutting Corners on Trust
There is a reason why permission-based marketing, a concept Seth Godin articulated decades ago, remains the gold standard. When someone opts in to hear from you, every subsequent message carries more weight. Open rates are higher. Engagement is deeper. And the relationship has a foundation that can support future asks, whether that is a product launch, a paid tier, or a sponsorship opportunity.
When you bypass that process through cold outreach or purchased lists, you may see a short-term spike in numbers. But you are building on sand. The people you reach did not choose you. They have no loyalty. And many of them will associate your brand with the interruption rather than the value.
The thing is that the most effective email programs are built on genuine subscriber intent, not list size. A smaller, permission-based list consistently outperforms a larger, cold-acquired one in every metric that matters: open rate, click-through rate, conversion, and long-term retention.
For independent bloggers and small digital publishers, this is especially important. You do not have the brand equity buffer that a company like FeedBurner had. If you spam someone, they are unlikely to give you a second chance. Your reputation is your primary asset, and every unsolicited message chips away at it.
Common Mistakes and Outdated Thinking
One of the more persistent myths in digital marketing is that outreach and spam are entirely different things. The reasoning usually goes something like this: “I’m not selling Viagra. I’m offering something genuinely useful. Therefore, it’s not spam.” This is the exact logic FeedBurner’s defenders used in 2006, and it was wrong then too.
The relevance of your offer does not grant you permission to deliver it. A blogger who sends unsolicited emails about their new course to a scraped list of WordPress users is engaging in the same behavior as FeedBurner, just at a smaller scale. The intent may be good. The impact is still corrosive.
Another common mistake is conflating personalization with permission. Modern outreach tools make it easy to insert a recipient’s name, reference their latest blog post, or mention a mutual connection. These tactics create the illusion of a personal relationship, but if the recipient never opted in to the conversation, the personalization is merely decoration on an uninvited intrusion. Experienced creators sometimes fall into this trap because they have been on the receiving end of effective outreach and assume it works the same when they are the ones initiating it.
A subtler error is assuming that because email service providers like Mailchimp or ConvertKit have built-in compliance features, anything sent through them is automatically ethical. These platforms enforce CAN-SPAM and GDPR requirements at a technical level, but compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. You can be legally compliant and still damage your reputation by emailing people who did not truly want to hear from you.
Perhaps the most overlooked mistake is failing to think about the cumulative experience of the recipient. Your one well-crafted cold email may be thoughtful and relevant. But it lands in an inbox alongside fifty other cold emails from people who believe the exact same thing about their message. The recipient does not evaluate your email in isolation. They evaluate it in the context of all the other noise competing for their attention. And in that context, uninvited is uninvited.
Building Reach Without Burning Trust
The alternative to spam is not passivity. It is patience combined with strategy. Growing an audience through content, through search, through genuine community participation, and through delivering so much value that people actively seek you out takes longer. But the audience you build this way is fundamentally different in quality.
If you want to reach new readers, write guest posts on publications where your target audience already gathers. Participate in conversations on social platforms without immediately pitching. Create free resources that are genuinely useful and let people discover them through search. Build an email list by offering something worth subscribing to, and let the act of subscription be the signal that someone wants to hear from you.
None of this is fast. None of it offers the immediate gratification of blasting a thousand emails and watching your traffic spike. But every subscriber you earn through consent is worth more than a hundred names on a scraped list. They are more likely to read what you write, to share it, to buy what you sell, and to stick around when things get difficult.
The FeedBurner story is useful not because it was a dramatic scandal, but because it was so ordinary. A good company with a good product made a lazy decision about growth and paid for it in credibility. That pattern repeats constantly in digital publishing. The companies and creators who break the pattern are the ones who understand that trust is not a resource to be extracted. It is the foundation that everything else is built on.
If your growth strategy requires you to contact people who have not asked to hear from you, it is worth pausing to ask a simple question: would you be comfortable if every recipient knew exactly how you got their email address? If the answer creates even a moment of discomfort, the strategy needs to change. Not because the rules demand it, but because the kind of audience worth having is the kind that chose to be there.
