[thelist] sending mail to someone youve never met before

Maximillian Schwanekamp lists at neptunewebworks.com
Fri Oct 1 01:33:55 CDT 2004


Alex Beston wrote:

> ok, but if someone has a site about x and they leave their email on 
> it, surely they are inviting mail?
> if they are into x and you are mailing only about x surely they would 
> be into that? a warm reception?

So I have a site for my web dev business, that could arguably be said to 
be about e-commerce, coaching, and other topics.  Does that mean I am 
inviting anyone to send me unsolicited commercial email messages for 
products related to these rather broad subjects?  No.  It's spam.  At 
the risk of going off-topic, the only legitimate way IMHO to get your 
message in front of a list who may not have otherwise heard about you is 
via someone else who has a large established list of addresses of people 
who have explicitly consented to receiving messages from related third 
parties.  The list owner takes your message and sends it to their list 
on your behalf, rather in the manner of introducing a new friend to 
party guests.   Thus there is a certain amount of trust involved. 
Harvesting addresses from websites (whether by hand or by bot) has no 
trust involved, certainly not consent.

I'm not implying you're wanting to spam, Alex, but it's is a common 
misconception that having a topic-related website with a contact email 
posted is inviting unsolicited commercial messages.

-- 
Maximillian Von Schwanekamp
Dynamic Websites and E-Commerce
NeptuneWebworks.com <http://www.neptunewebworks.com/>
voice: 541-302-1438
fax: 208-730-6504



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