Why not just make a newsletter and link to it on your game's pages? I mean, that is effectively the same thing and doesn't put Itch.io in a tight spot if people abuse it. You are asking for a complex solution to something that you can more easily solve yourself, and do a better job at maintaining anyway. You can brand it how YOU want, and have total control over it. Also, this isn't some wild idea, it's actually standard industry practice.
Viewing post in Collect emails on free download
i I don't know how to do those, honestly. But I think would be nice to have all this integrated on itch, and exactly relying on itch.io to maintain this as a good feature, it already does it as I mentioned.
Also it would be hard to abuse it as well, itch.io already limit the amount of emails we can send, as I mentioned people can opt in and out of that easily.
It is not a complex request:
Add followers category to the built in email tool, there is nothing in this request that isn't already there, is just a matter of matching them.
devlogs are for reading, you dont give away anyone infomation and uploading melwere thing is impossable.
Publish projects are not that abused with itch.io scanning and players reporting it. mods remove it quicker than steam.
you can not control feeds, there is no rule on it like steam.
game jams are game james, people can report any jam that looks like a scammer might steal their info.
What you want with email can be abused for both gamedev and players, the infomation is not going to be accurate. ask anyone in steam when they ask for email, you'll see how easy it is to just add random fake emails into the list. steam even allows fake emails to be counted as accounts. nothing about the email marking is ever going to work.
can you describe me how the moderators and players aren't in the control of the feature I am talking about? Or do you really want to ignore everything I said regarding the fact that we don't have access to players' emails because that's on itch.io's server we can only use general categories to add them to our email using itch.io's build in emailing tool?
Your feature isn't made, there are hundress of ways to make it. And you keep adding new things that were not talked about. Also, the video talks about people entering your email list, not forcing it on them with "hey you want to download this, you need to give email". The guy said it has to be by the user giving it away to you not doing many sneaky things, that is not ok.