I'm not a spammer, I just need to blast these potential customers | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a spammer, I just need to blast these potential customers

rethink.unspace.ca

54 pointspeteforde53 comments

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.

Hey Chad,

I make the same argument about using an above-the-board SMTP service like Campaign Monitor as I would about deploying to a managed app stack like Heroku: sure there are other ways (including DIY) but the cost/hassle ratio is vastly in favour of doing the right thing.

The question is not whether it's technically possible to get away with grey area techniques; it is. I'm writing from the perspective of someone that has to give clients advice that I'm proud to stand by in a public forum.

I'm reacting to the phrase "they're criminals" - I've had clients, really, really valuable clients, ask me to spam for them. I've had to say NO, unequivocally and awkwardly.

Then, I've had them ask for me to build tools that could help them mangage email campaigns... I build those tools, and I know what they could do with those tools. I hope they don't and I counsel them about what they can do and cannot do. I'm OK with this the same way I'm OK with telling them they're free to go over the speed limit in a car I built for them if they want. It's their choice and I believe there's a difference between occasional speeding and reckless endangerment the same way there's a difference between the occasional campaign from the boise real estate lady who put her stack of business cards on her email list and the true BULK spammer...

Just as a point of clarification, I believe that marketers who send out millions of emails are bad people. They actively avoid doing the right thing, and have no interest in making anything better so long as they are making money.

If you read what I actually wrote, I did not suggest that accidental spammers (ie. your clients and mine) are bad people. Please understand that you are misquoting me.

I further believe that it's up to folks like you and me to be patient and help people do the right thing when possible.

OK, since you're now accusing me of misquoting you and i'm sure that i'm not, I want to be clear: We're not in agreement at all. I think you're now trying to rewrite what you said to make us in agreement.

I was responding to the letter of what you wrote "they're criminals" and the spirit of what you wrote "they're boobs", and I don't think I misconstrued either.

I'd further add that it's the "people who get it" vs the "people who don't" attitude of the OP that spurned my response, not the defense of accidental spammers.

Chad, I haven't changed a letter of the post since it first went up. You're referring to a paragraph where I am describing parasitic marketers that don't care about whether they are doing something wrong.

In the very next paragraph, I say:

"What of the accidental spammer, though? How do we break them of their regrettable bad habits? Can they be shown a better way?"

I specifically stop to differentiate between the two very different personalities I'm discussing.

If you are offended by my assertion that there are people who don't know that they are spamming, then yes — we disagree... and you haven't worked with the people in question.

In Canada, spammers are criminals. Elsewhere, they're just selfish assholes. Some people mean well but don't know they are being assholes. I'm sorry if that bothers you, but chances are this article wasn't written for you.

"Just as a point of clarification, I believe that marketers who send out millions of emails are bad people."

Better be careful who you paint with that wide brush. I know marketers with legitimate opt-in lists of 250,000+ people. It's not how many emails you send -- it's about making sure that you're sending those emails to people who want to receive your emails, and who have opted in to do so.

Totally fair. I did say "millions" but I concede to your point.

    It does not automatically follow that people doing
    something criminal are doing something morally repugnant.

And the obverse is also true: It does not automatically follow that people doing something legal are doing something morally acceptable.

Agreed, the article has a weird confrontational prose that left me confused, scared and wondering if I was doing to right thing with my mailing lists.

Good bit of link bait I guess but not a constructive article.

I didn't mean to leave you confused or scared. And true to the spirit of my article, I'm eager to help you or anyone else figure out the answer to the question of "am I doing the right thing" to the best of my ability. I'm not an email marketer, but if you want to talk about why you're concerned, then I'm hoping to turn your opinion of the relative value of my article.

Want to talk about it? I'm leftisto on Skype.

This article is also factually wrong when it comes to the US. It is NOT illegal to send unsolicited email according to CAN-SPAM. All you are required to do is honor unsubscribes and provide contact info.

Also, if customers are already on your list, they've implicitly open in to receive transactional and commercial emails. You may get in trouble with your ISP or anti-spam authorities, but unless you're blasting out millions of spam emails without any way to unsubscribe, you will never get in trouble with the law.

Correct. But to be fair, it's a Canadian domain, and the article linked to a report on the Canadian equivalent of Can-Spam.

It's factually wrong for any country that isn't Canada.

I'm Canadian, but thanks for stopping by!

Wait, wasn't Canada admitted to the Union in January 1959?</joke>

edit: I should mention that I'm Minnesotan, I am routinely mistaken for a Canadian (much to real Canadians' frustration), I dearly love Arcade Fire and Tim Horton's Timbits, and I have a bad tendency of ending sentences with the word "eh," eh?

I live in Minnesota, and I have high hopes that in the future Minnesota will secede from the US and become part of Canada.

People out here in Seattle say something similar :) http://zapatopi.net/cascadia/

edit: and, just to tie it all back together, check out where Goodspaceguy is from: http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201007306418.pre-decision_201...

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.

What?

I can only hope this is a joke.

"They" aren't wrecking the system, so much as the inherent flaw in the system makes it inevitable. Email costs a negligible amount to send and there's no way to reliably control the overall system.

It's not a problem in isolation, either. The bigger issue of systems that no longer meet the definition of economic scarcity is growing. Scarcity has always been our way of controlling abuse by excess, but many things are becoming so cheap as to negate this method. We need to build other methods into our World.

Some systems that have dropped dramatically in price, such as phone usage minutes, haven't become a problem (much). Others, such as calories, have become severe ones. Email abuse didn't hurt much else, but it's nearly ruined email itself.

They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer.

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

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.

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.

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?

As far as I am concerned it doesn't matter if it is polite or not - if someone doesn't have an existing relationship with me and they send a non-targeted email to me offering a product or service then it is spam.

However, if someone contacts me with a targeted email that looks like they have actually given it some thought and explains where they got my details then I will give it some consideration and reply politely (even if it is to say "no" - which it usually is).

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.

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)

As a marketer myself and someone who advises small business owners on this, you're far better off calling them than emailing them. First, with the right phone script, you'll get a much higher response rate. Second, you don't risk getting your email list account dropped because you bought a list and your subscribers didn't actually opt in to receive YOUR marketing messages.

This especially applies in any "non-techie" industry such as the one cited (hair dressers). Non-techies are far more likely to hit "Report Spam" than to find the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each message.

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?

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.

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.

Thank you!

Full credit to our incredible CSS master, Shawn Allison.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think the key point is that the recipients of these emails often haven't subscribed; they've been "discovered."

I've seen companies do this, I've been on the receiving end of this. Both suck.

Your (or my) definition of "shouldn't matter" is not at issue. The two primary above-board email distribution services (MailChimp and Campaign Monitor) will boot you to the curb if you go beyond 1% unsubscribes. I'm stating fact, not opinion.

Therefore, the issue is that if you serve them anything more than a few months after you get their email address, they are much more likely to unsubscribe. And on those services, unsubscribes count against your standing.

The two primary above-board email distribution services (MailChimp and Campaign Monitor) will boot you to the curb if you go beyond 1% unsubscribes. I'm stating fact, not opinion.

I call bullshit. A 1% unsub rate at MailChimp triggers a warning but not even a manual review, let alone "kicking you to the curb". You can see them talk about it more in the comments on this post:

http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/how-to-reactivate-inactive-sub...

Thanks for the insanely information-dense link, Ryan.

I assure you that no bullshit was intended; the stuff in the comments directly contradicts both the account suspension emails received and the contents of the MailChimp FAQ.

A big part of the reason I posted this was to get more background information, and today you were that special someone.

Can you post something a little more specific to your point, like the contents of the emails in question or the FAQ page where it backs up your point?

And thanks, I feel special.

I actually don't have the emails I question, because the article is not about me or a client. They are, from what I've been told, a fairly scary sounding "one strike" template, nothing special.

The FAQ pages in question are linked prominently in the article. They have an entire section on this topic.

Wait, you've never seen these emails?

And I checked the FAQ and didn't see anything about a 1% unsub rate resulting in account suspension or anything. Maybe I missed it? Care to point it out?

The people in the article are not clients of mine. They are clients of my girlfriend — why is this a factor? I don't have access to their emails.

As for the 1% details... you missed them:

http://www.mailchimp.com/kb/article/about-warnings/

They are all over the MailChimp FAQs.

You seem kind of hostile towards me, and I'm honestly not sure why.

Poking around for an unsubscribe link on an email I did not want to receive in the first place takes effort. Hitting the "Report spam" button takes none.

that unsubscribe link is always at the bottom

In a smaller font, I have to scroll to get to it, then scan to find out exactly where it is.

I did not ask for this email, and it is trying to sell me something. It is, by my definition, spam. Not only do I not owe the senders the courtesy of finding an unsubscribe button, I feel good hitting the "Mark as spam" button.

Well, a quick review of my Inbox suggests that you are wrong on that point.

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.

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.

I'm so fucking tired of "opt-out" bullshit.

So-called "opt-out" must DIE DIE DIE!

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