Zookoda Suspended by IZEA
Zookoda, the ‘Complete Blog eNewsletter Solution’, has faced some scrutiny in the past ten days or so, first with the announcement on December 10 that their growth started causing problems and exposed weaknesses int he software, resulting in further problems with members’ accounts. Support requests were never answered, and spammers began taking over the system.
On December 18, broadcasts had to be manually reviewed before sending. This was a drastic step, based upon the need to ensure that spammers could be removed from the system. Their terms of service changed, and more problems arose including late broadcasts.
Now, all broadcasts have been halted. The infrastructure that the PayPerPost company had, combined with millions of new signups and thousands of spammers, helped create this situation. Ted Murphy, the owner of IZEA, states that the service will be back soon, but until then, many publishers will have to find another service. Many reports of the service think that the service won’t be back or that they’ve switched services, although the owner says it should be reintegrated by January, if not sooner. Running a bulk email service is a risky business, facing constant criticism as shown in this example.
The Current Situation
We have recently experienced greatly elevated levels of abuse on Zookoda.com. Zookoda is a fantastic service that provides you with a means to reach out to your blog readers with detailed and rich email newsletters. We offered the service completely for free and so, as is the way with all things Internet, a annoying minority decided to abuse the system. We found ourselves a few weeks ago facing a massive backlog of broadcasts many of which were spam related.
Their View of Spam
We hate spam. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that really enjoys spam. Some people hate spam even more than we hate spam and those people complained to our network hosting service. Our network hosting service REALLY hate spam. We implemented a manual review process earlier this week to catch the spammers on Zookoda and that worked. The problem though is that even our legitimate users have email addresses in their broadcast lists that are non-existent, or who have decided they no longer wish to receive the legitimate content our users provide. The end result is usually a spam complaint to our hosting service.
The Future of Zookoda
Today we’re stopping Zookoda broadcasts. The system will remain live, but broadcasts will not be sent. We are going to be making some more changes to the infrastructure and will allow for broadcasts again in early January. In the meantime though this is a pain for our legitimate users and I can only offer my most sincere apologies to you guys for the disruption this is undoubtedly going to cause.
