Maybe you wanted to promote something, contact friends or relatives you never really emailed before (at least with a normal email), send a chain letter that promised success and money or to promote a garage sale using your local hockey team email list? Maybe you sent a message for your business using a large contact list grabbed on a corporate email with a multitude of CC’d addresses? Or did you ‘borrow’ the customer list from work for your own use? (Oh, that’s bad!)
Where is the ‘do not cross’ line? If you play by the rules, a user must confirm his subscription and you must keep track of when/how he subscribed. It can be considered spam if you hide your real email content by pretending to be something that the user already subscribed to. I think the worst thing is to subscribe to a social media site and authorize the analysis of your address book to see who else registered on this site. What their fine print didn’t tell you is that invitations can be sent to your contact list on your behalf, spamming your whole address book from your son’s teachers to your financial advisor. Yep, you’re now a stoolie!
So, what are the guidelines to proper behavior?
– Identify yourself: the FROM address and the FOOTER should reveal your real information
– Undisclosed-Recipients: while you want to reveal YOUR information, be careful to not reveal the recipients’. You can use the ‘Undisclosed-Recipients’ feature, but it’s always better to show the real recipient name in the TO field.
– Show where your data comes from: you should always state somewhere that the user subscribed to your list or accepted an invitation
– Make it *easy* to unsubscribe: this is probably the most important rule. Provide a one-click web confirmation, an automated reply email, etc. The harder it is to unsubscribe, the better the chances of getting blacklisted.
And, of course, do not spam! Spamming from work is an especially bad idea: not only can you can get into trouble, you can get the office IP ‘banned’ for sending spam (and yes, it has happened).
And how about the endless ‘joke’ emails, urban legends, and let’s not forget the ‘my friend has a puppy to give urgently’.
ots of people just think spammers are people sitting in darkened rooms firing out thousands of emails a second. That’s not true they can be anyone, as you explain well in this article.
I particularly hate it when people send out emails listing each email address individually. I always think, thanks, you have just sent my email address to lots of people I don’t know!
We are trying to cut down the number of unwanted marketing emails people receive. Please help us by letting us know the companies that send you too many emails. (http://www.spamratings.com)
Alex Robinson
Spam Ratings