Congratulations on your blog. Very nice job.

This double opt-in topic is timely for me because Bob and I were just discussing whether we should make a change.

We use 1shopping cart also and had been using a double opt-in set-up. We were talking to a friend, an internet marketing consultant, recently and she said she avoids double opt-in as much as possible. She said the confirmation message gets blocked by some ISPs and that it seriously drags down your subscription rate.

This is what we saw happening. There were even friends and colleagues—people who already knew and trusted us— who said, “Hey I signed up and never got one e-tip issue.” Somehow they were not receiving the confirmation message, even though it showed it had been sent on our end.

Our friend said that the newsletter services will try to scare you wtih horror stories about “all the bad things that can happen” but that’s just to protect themselves from their mail servers getting flagged as sending spam. She said that yes, you can get some false susbcribes but they’re pretty obvious and she just deletes them from her list before she sends a newsletter.

While 1shoppingcart presents their Tier 1 (double opt-in) server as a more secure system that rewards merchants who follow e-mail best practices, she said that they started the Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems a few years ago when they got blacklisted by Comcast, AOL and others for looking the other way when some users were sending spam, and their delivery rates went through the floor.

She said that’s when she quit using them. BUT, she said that if you’re selling info products, need an affiliate program and are trying to cross-market (all of which we are), you pretty much have to use them.

This is a complicated issue. We switched to single opt-in two weeks ago and are already seeing our subscriber rates increase quite dramatically. I’m still not sure which is best. Just thought I would share this with you all.