SendMeRSS

SendMeRSS was an RSS-to-email gateway created by Randy Charles Morin and later sold to NBC Universal on April 24, 2007.[1] Prior to November 6, 2007, SendMeRSS was known as RMail. RMail was created on April 24, 2005.[2]

NBC Spamming

Late in the lifespan of SendMeRSS, NBC was likely breaking anti-spam laws. The service was sending subscription emails where the unsubscribe link was failing. NBC later deleted the SendMeRSS MX record making it impossible for users to contact NBC support to get their subscriptions deleted.

On October 20, The Raw Feed blog[3] reported that NBC was breaking anti-spam laws. NBC shut down the service later that same day. Two weeks later, the executive responsible for SendMeRSS resigned from NBC.[4]

DealMeRSS

NBC also created a sister website called DealMeRSS which appears to be SERP spam. All of the content is stolen from other sites and the links are all affiliate programs. It is the most professionally run Splog ever. NBC may have been using SendMeRSS to seed DealMeRSS, which now has over 20,000 inbound links according to Google,[5] most all of them generated by the SendMeRSS tool.

Shutdown

SendMeRSS was shut down in late summer of 2008. No reason or warning was given by NBC. For a couple weeks, the website had a message that said "The SendMeRSS service is currently down. We're working on a solution. Any inconvenience is deeply regretted", but this disappeared and all DNS entries were eventually deleted, including their blog and email MX records. NBC refuses to respond to any emails or contact on the subject. The original owner Randy Morin has apologized to his old users, but has admitted that he is not aware of the reason for the outage.

The email engine was shut down on October 20. The website was shut down about two weeks prior.

On June 1, 2009, the SendMeRSS website was temporarily available at www.r-mail.org, but was shut down again and now reads "The SendMeRSS service is currently down. We're working on a solution. Any inconvenience is deeply regretted." once again.

Demise

In July 2008, some bloggers reported[6] that emails sent to the SendMeRSS support email address were bouncing. This was likely the first sign that problems were on the horizon.

By late August, Randy Morin, the original owner, was warning[7] users against using SendMeRSS.

Scrouged

Any user that had existing RSS subscriptions via email lost all their data.[8] Had NBC given any notice, the users could have exported their subscriptions for use with an alternate service. Five months after the initial outage, the users have not received any reply to their support emails to NBC. They have not communicated why the outage happened or when it might be resolved.

RMail 2.0

Morin has announced a replacement for Rmail that will be called Reblinks. Reblinks went live on May 20, 2009, seven months after Rmail died.

Team

References

  1. ↑ "NBC Universal looks to feed off Rmail". Reuters. May 1, 2007.
  2. ↑ "Introducing RMail".
  3. ↑ "Raw Feed blog report NBC Spamming".
  4. ↑ "George Kiavkoff Resigns from NBC".
  5. ↑ "Inbound links to DealMeRSS".
  6. ↑ "Pittland reports bouncing emails".
  7. ↑ "Randy Warns Against Further Use".
  8. ↑ "NBC Shutsdown SendMeRSS without warning".

External links

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