An interesting question, a more interesting one would be,

Autoresponders are not new, they have been present for many years, going back to the very origin of email and the internet. Basic autoresponders were used many years ago to send out floods of email, almost entirely unsolicited, to hundreds of thousands of people. This still goes on today, as you can probably tell by the amount of spam email that no doubt turns up in your inbox daily.

To combat this phenomenon, and to try and alleviate the growing demands on peoples time, as they were forced to manually sort through the junk mail each day and find the real email in-between, the idea of email blacklists was introduced. If a domain, mail server or IP address is found to be consistently delivering junk email, it may find itself added to one of these lists. What does being put on an email blacklist mean? Well it means that email sent from the banned entity, will almost definitely be seen by the major email services, email clients and ISPs as junk mail, and either be ignored, or dumped into a users junk email folder in the very least. It must be evidently clear, that any real mail sent from these sources, would also receive the same treatment.

So we can see how an autoresponder may have detrimental affects upon the email delivery of the sending source, but this can only happen if the autoresponder is either used incorrectly, or specifically configured to send email that could be construed as spam and ultimately end up with the source being added to the email blacklists. If this were to happen by accident, then yes, we could say that an autoresponder can be a liability.

But are autoresponders inherently bad? By themselves they are not, if used sensibly and correctly, they can be an asset to any on-line business. The possibilities for time saving, and increased communication with clients is often enormous, but care must be taken not to cross over the line of email good etiquette and use the autoresponder to send unsolicited, unwanted emails to individuals who neither requested it nor want it. This is the grey area, where it could well be said that autoresponders are a liability. But they are only a liability to those people who do not use them as they are intended to be used, if they are employed towards the aims they were developed to serve, then they cannot be a liability, indeed they can be nothing but a useful and productive tool in the hands of somebody who respects the risks involved when using them.

So to answer the original question as a summary, are autoresponders and asset or liability? The answer is neither and both; depending on the usage they are put too.

Autoresponders an asset or a liability? is a post from: All About Autoresponders

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