There is a growing sentiment in some business circles that spam can be clearly defined by what is and isn’t allowed under the typical anti-spam legislation enacted by governments these days.
In the US the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 (the acronym drawn from the bill’s full name “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing”) effectively legalized spam by applying three basic requirements to commercial emails:
- Visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism, with requests honored within 10 days
- Accurate content such as From: fields and subject lines, and includes a legitimate physical address of the advertiser
- Not sent via open relay, does not contain false headers, and is not sent to harvested email addresses
Some organizations have taken this legal standard and run with it, sending commercial email to addresses obtained through bought lists, co-registration, incentive offers, and other innocuous means such as when filling out forms or dropping business cards into prize draws at conferences.
And to comply with the unsubscribe requirements they use onerous mechanisms for unsubscribe requests instead of simple one-click methods.
And while doing all of this they insist that it’s not spam. After all, the law says so. It’s just perfectly legitimate email marketing.
You Don’t Get to Decide
I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide that. And by “you” I mean businesses. Businesses and their marketing departments who look at email as a fast, convenient way to reach a lot of people with their very important messages.
Now for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make some definitions clear. I’m not talking about the kind of spam that botnets send out to try and trick people into buying fake pharmaceutical goods or a counterfeit watch. Continue reading Who Gets to Decide if it’s Spam? Not you, Mr Marketer


There have recently been two publicized, high profile attacks on email marketing services. The two services are
British ISPs have
Business Week
It has been a big year for the internet with social networks continuing to grow at an amazing pace, search engines scrambling to keep pace with user demand for fresh news, and as always spam and malware causing havoc around the world.
I came across
advertise Chinese electronics and apparel retailers (and it’s a sure bet that the products they sell are counterfeits!) and look something like this:
