

I'm not a spammer, I just need to blast these potential customers - peteforde
http://rethink.unspace.ca/2010/9/5/not-a-spammer

======
rubyrescue
I don't want to be "pro spammer", but this article has some sort of attitude.
I usually call it 'easy elitism' - when a person can easily label a group of
people 'criminal'. It does not automatically follow that people doing
something criminal are doing something morally repugnant.

There are plenty of people doing non-double-opt-in mailing lists out there in
the world, there are plenty of mail services that look the other way; this is
reality, legal or not.

~~~
prodigal_erik
They are willfully wrecking a worldwide communication medium just to save
marketing costs by forcing the burden onto innocent people. They're doing more
harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer. If there were a way
to ban them from ever touching a networked computer for the rest of their
lives, I would.

~~~
dmoney
_They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or
killer._

I'd be interested to hear the argument for this.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Email is a reliable, negligible cost, vendor neutral communication system
that's accessible to about two billion people worldwide. There has never been
anything quite like that in history, and a mere handful of spammers (probably
thousands, definitely not millions) are making it unusable. If those spammers
had instead each gone on a local crime spree, any carnage and mayhem would
have gone completely unnoticed by 1.99 billion of those people.

~~~
dmoney
So they have a global effect, true. But with spam filters that effect is very
small. One or two spam messages get through now and then, but you delete them
and move on. If you get murdered you stay dead, people around you mourn, and
your neighborhood is perceived as less safe.

------
ssp
I'm curious what people would think of this scenario:

You have made a niche software product that targets a very specific kind of
small business (hair dressers, say). The product is genuinely interesting to
many of them; it will save them time and money.

You have a big list of email addresses of such businesses, but no prior
relationship with them. Is it okay to send all of them a one-time polite mail
about the product?

~~~
peteforde
If you take the time to research every person on said list and construct an
email _to_ them instead of _at_ them, then I don't see the harm.

A good baseline test is whether you're working from a template or not — and
the answer should be no. Of course, you might have some bits that you paste in
that would be repetitive to type, but in general there's a world of difference
between composing an email and targeting a campaign.

Now, this might be OT but I have noticed that the most successful start-ups
are run by an entrepreneur with a very specific unfair advantage:
history/experience/connections in the target domain.

That's not to say you won't pull it off, but if you have to cold email
everyone you hope to sell to, perhaps you should considering partnering with
someone that already knows the folks you'd be pitching.

It seems obvious, but it's amazing how many folks are arrogant enough to think
that they can walk into any vertical and take over.

~~~
notahacker
I don't think legal templated emails are particularly harmful provided your
targeting is sufficiently precise for the content to be relevant to most of
the recipients even without you knowing explicit details of their individual
circumstances

"Are people more likely to actually express an interest in buying the product
than unsubscribe?" is probably a good rule of thumb (and that goes for opt-in
emails as well)

------
stoney
The law referenced is Canadian, but I've often wondered which set of laws
cover something like an email list (and things like affiliate links on blogs).
What if my potential recipients span several countries? Should I abide by my
local rules? The local rules for my email list provider (if I'm using
something like Mailchimp)? The union of all of the recipients' local rules?

~~~
peteforde
Your local laws are the ones that you could potentially be held accountable
to.

MailChimp is American, Campaign Monitor is Australia. They are subject to the
laws of their lands.

However, the rules that apply to you most directly are the rules of your
upstream SMTP provider. They will be more harsh than your legal restrictions,
and with good reason. If we relied on the courts to keep us free from spam,
then we'd drown in it.

------
sprout
OT: That site has a beautifully fluid layout. It's a wonderful change from
mobile layouts like WordPress.com's mobile blog layout that absolutely refuses
to let you view text at anything larger than 'tiny' on the Droid.

Though I think this may be an issue with the Android browser giving websites
too much latitude in fixing font sizes.

~~~
peteforde
Thank you!

Full credit to our incredible CSS master, Shawn Allison.

------
zaidf
Wow - this post is so factually misleading for vast majority readers not
living in Canada.

~~~
peteforde
I'm a Canadian. Not really planning on normalizing my writing to American laws
just yet, sorry.

For what it's worth, only a small portion of my article deals with Canadian
spam laws. The majority of the links are to MailChimp FAQ pages, and they are
an American company.

~~~
zaidf
Considering _you_ posted this to HN, you have at least some responsibility to
take your audience's location into account. I'd suggest a little note stating
you're referring to Canadian law.

Honestly I am not certain about the point of your post. If it was that "hey
make sure your unsubscribes stay under 1%", there are easiesr ways to
communicate that without bashing small businesses or linking to spam laws
local to your country.

~~~
peteforde
Yesterday, I didn't realize that companies like MailChimp had 1% tolerance,
and I was hoping the article would start a conversation; it did. It seems as
though this is a common enough problem that people are tweeting about my
article, regardless of where they live.

You know that there is a huge start-up culture in Toronto, right? Hacker News
has hundreds of Canadian readers.

Anyhow, unspace.ca implies Canada to me. I'm sorry you were confused.

------
brandon272
The assertion that spammers in Canada are "criminals" is incorrect. Canada
does not currently have anti-spam laws on the books, as far as I am aware. The
author does not understand the difference between a bill and a law.

------
vaksel
as long as you provide an unsubscribe link(and the people actually subscribed)
it shouldn't matter what you do with an email list.

if you send them crap, they can always unsubscribe

~~~
akadruid
You're only considering one of the three parties; the spammer.

Party #2 is the spammee: "they can always unsubscribe" shows a callous and
naive disregard for the depth of the problem. The spamee has incurred a small
cost in time to deal with this particular spam; this may not seem much but
soon multiplies; If the spammer is now dealing with tens of crap messages, on
their mobile phone, during a ten minute lunch break, the spammers have just
suceeded in breaking the spammee's email system. Completely.

Party #3 is the legimate email sender. Sending email is now so complicated
that legimate mail users must delegate to ever more technically proficent
third parties to deliver legitimate mail, and the deliverability of mail
between consenting parties is compromised.

Whether or not they "subscribed" is irrelevant, due the number of ways people
get "subscribed". What they actually wanted was the item they purchased
online, or the service they are paying for, or whatever; not an inbox full of
special offers.

Interestingly, this debate is about to blow up in a different area. The cost
of access to the PSTN from disposable numbers is collapsing thanks to
competition in the VOIP space, most PSTN terminals have zero filtering, and
unlike email, the PSTN started being used for important stuff long before
anyone started abusing it. Voice spam will be huge in 2011.

~~~
vaksel
i recognize the legitimate concerns where you fill out a registration form/buy
something, and they sign you up by default...but otherwise I don't see what
the problem is.

If you give me your email to receive my newsletter, it's not spam if I send it
to you.

Especially since it only takes 1 click to stop getting it.

