whats the law on email campaigns

[moneysaver]

can i contact businesses via email to sell my products or is this a big no no. i have had various feedback but some say its ok and some say its not

[microbe]

Yes, you can contact businesses by email to sell your products.

This is a good article http://www.techscribe.co.uk/ta/uce_spam_law.htm

If you send Unsolicited Commercial Email expect the response rates to be extremely poor, spammers get tiny conversion rates and only make money by sending millions of emails. Are you asking if it is ok to be a spammer?

If you have a genuine, specific, relevant proposition to put to someone, then you have to weigh up which is going to be a) the most effective and b) the most cost effective way to approach them, mail/telephone/email/personal visit, in each case.

Filling someone's inbox with unsolicited email is at least as good a way to alienate them as littering their office with unwanted paper 'offers' or pestering them with unwanted phone calls.

I couldn't work out from your web site what your business is, I would suggest you do some work on that before you start any kind of marketing campaign.

[inspireme]

Spamming is illegal, and extremly annoying. If i got an email from you saying i can save £300 but then completly neglect to say how, why, and whats the catch i would consider it spam.

I do email campaigns for my campsite directory http://www.bigfreeguide.com I email campsite owners and offer them the opportunity to add a free listing to the directory. Its relevant, useful, and something most people are intrested at looking into.

If you go ahead and email anybody you can find then dont be supprised if your email appears in the MAPS database (spam blacklist)

[microbe]

Originally Posted by inspireme

Spamming is illegal, and extremly annoying. If i got an email from you saying i can save £300 but then completly neglect to say how, why, and whats the catch i would consider it spam.

I do email campaigns for my campsite directory http://www.bigfreeguide.com I email campsite owners and offer them the opportunity to add a free listing to the directory. Its relevant, useful, and something most people are intrested at looking into.

If you go ahead and email anybody you can find then dont be supprised if your email appears in the MAPS database (spam blacklist)

It is not illegal to send an unsolicited email to someone. Read the article I linked to in my orignal post.

There is variation in the way that people define "spam", but I would have thought "unsolicited bulk commercial email selling or advertising something" would be roughly what I would consider spam. This would include your bulk mails to campsite owners, although as you say, what you are offering to your targeted list is of genuine value to them, so in their situation, I would be unlikely to object to what you are doing ..... certainly it is in a different league to the deluge of crap I get every day offering to stiffen/lengthen/soften parts of my anatomy or sell me Rolexes/High Web Rankings/other junk.

[inspireme]

here is the definition of spam : http://www.mail-abuse.com/spam_def.html

here is what is allowed to be sent: http://www.tech-encyclopedia.com/can-spam-act.htm

Unsolicited emails arent illegal. If Spam does not comply with the second url then it is illegal.

I host 50 sites on a server and get over 500 spam emails a day, every single spam email i get is detected using spamassasin, and i send the headers off to maps and the abuse email address for the domain name. At a guess about 400 of the emails are illegal becuase they contain no opt-out (unsubscription), and use falsified email headers which makes virtually untraceable, (it can be traced but would take to long to be worth me doing)

I have been targeted by a spammer (they used one of my domain names in the falsified header) and i got 1000s of emails asking me to stop, and further 1000s of emails being bounced.

So although you can do it, make sure you do it right and be prepared to get hundreds of nasty emails back

[microbe]

Originally Posted by inspireme

here is the definition of spam : http://www.mail-abuse.com/spam_def.html

No that is not the definition of spam, it is a definition of spam. Here are a few more define:spam and this is the DTI definition: Spam is: 'Unsolicited marketing e-mail sent without the consent of the addressee and without any attempt at targeting on recipients who are likely to be interested in its contents.'

Which come to think of it would specifically exclude your targeted mailings to campsite owners.

Originally Posted by inspireme

here is what is allowed to be sent: http://www.tech-encyclopedia.com/can-spam-act.htm

That is an American law. While you may well be bound by American law in certain contexts, someone who lives in Wales is bound all the time by UK law.

[inspireme]

the definistion of spam is from mail-abuse.com which handles millions of spam emails, and takes action against them, including adding them to 5 blacklist databases which effectivly stops the whole server from sending emails reliably, thats why i like to keep within their guidelines.

Secondly, UK law is appropriate to me, but so is USA law becuase my emails are sent from the USA as this is where my server is located. As the site is not a trading business as such, It has no physical location (like an office or trading address) the fact the server is located in the USA is a more important factor.


The DTI definition seems to hint that the original poster would be sending spam as they could not fulfill the follwing :
Recipients who are likely to be interested in its contents.

We discusssed earlier that we couldnt see what the site was all about, so how would anybody actually know if they are intrested in its contents?

The law really needs to be tightened up, as it all seems very subjective.

Its important people get their heads around this i belive, its good to look over it as its important and effects everybody.

Im about to trial a system to cut down on spam where the sender has to approve themselves before being allowed to send the email. Mass spammers will never be able to respond and click the linkt o approve themselves, and only genuine people have the message delivered. anybody else tried this? any success?

Im a bit worried about doing it server wide, but i will be trialing it for my own email address.

[microbe]

Originally Posted by inspireme

the definistion of spam is from mail-abuse.com which handles millions of spam emails, and takes action against them, including adding them to 5 blacklist databases which effectivly stops the whole server from sending emails reliably, thats why i like to keep within their guidelines.

Which is sound practice.

Originally Posted by inspireme

Secondly, UK law is appropriate to me, but so is USA law becuase my emails are sent from the USA as this is where my server is located. As the site is not a trading business as such, It has no physical location (like an office or trading address) the fact the server is located in the USA is a more important factor.

It looked to me that your site is commercial in that you are running ads, that would make it a trading business based in Wales.

Originally Posted by inspireme

The DTI definition seems to hint that the original poster would be sending spam as they could not fulfill the follwing :
Recipients who are likely to be interested in its contents.

We discusssed earlier that we couldnt see what the site was all about, so how would anybody actually know if they are intrested in its contents?

Quite!

Originally Posted by inspireme

Im about to trial a system to cut down on spam where the sender has to approve themselves before being allowed to send the email. Mass spammers will never be able to respond and click the linkt o approve themselves, and only genuine people have the message delivered. anybody else tried this? any success?

Im a bit worried about doing it server wide, but i will be trialing it for my own email address.

This sounds a bit complicated to implement. What happens when you have 10,000 camp sites signed up and who have opted in to your newsletter? I would be interested to hear more about this though.

[inspireme]

I added the ads last month, its a business that currently makes abotu $1 a day now I put the money through my accounts as a designer, so i guess its part of that business really.

This sounds a bit complicated to implement. What happens when you have 10,000 camp sites signed up and who have opted in to your newsletter? I would be interested to hear more about this though.

Its not really for my website, but in the example above the following would happen :

My email address admin@bigfreeguide.com is a protected email. I can send the newsletter out to everybody without problem. However if somebody replies to the email they need to be an approved sender. If they are an approved sender already the email is delivered. If they have not yet been approved they get sent an email asking them to click a link to approve themselves. Once they click the link i get the email.

Automated and mass emailing, and emails using false headers will never get the approval email or will never be able to respond so wont be delivered. If they do happen to approve it then i can just permanently ban the address from the system should i need to.

I can see this will cut down a massive amount of spam and will not be too much of a hastle for the senders, although im a little owrried that i may miss out on a few intresting newsletters etc that dont have monitored addresses. I will post the web address later i cant remember it and dont have it to hand here.

[inspireme]

heres the link
http://spamarrest.com/help/index.jsp

looks very intresting