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Comment by dshipper | Hacker News Reader

Yes definitely. In general as long as you're not mass emailing 1000s of potential prospects, you target specific people that you think would be interested, you tailor each email individually to them, and you're respectful and up-front about what you're doing things work out fine.

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Suppose I customize and email 1000s of potential clients. Is that considered as spam? Would you recommend any nice template/examples to use? Should I send these emails from a generic email box or from my personal email? If I include an "unsubscribe" option, won't the receiver think "hey, I never subscribed to this, let me mark it as spam".

On a side note, I used to contact potential clients years ago and then GoDaddy marked my domain as spam and made me cough up $199. The email wasn't even sent from the same domain (google godaddy spam scam). I moved off to NetworkSolutions. Anyone sending cold emails, please beware of this.

You can't customize 1000s of emails. Sure you can mail merge in their name, but putting their name in the first line is not customizing.

Customizing would be looking up information about their company, researching their competitors, talking to people who know them, figuring out what kind of food they like, and then crafting an email to them. That is not spam. That is hustle and marketing.

Also be sure to abide by CAM SPAM Act. Must include links to unsubscribe.

heh... But links to unsubscribe makes no sense when you're not sending a regular newsletter. You're just emailing them once. Plus it removes the sense of any personalization.. "Click here to unsubscribe? But I thought you were sending me a personal email!"

It's not so much that it "makes sense", but that you need it to comply with CAM SPAM.

Any unsolicited mail must have an unsubscribe link, even if you just email them once.

Just an FYI, it's the "CAN SPAM" act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

I thought it was a typo the first time you typed it, but I thought you should know when I saw it a second time.

There is no subscription. What are you unsubscribing from? Or just consider all such emails to be unsubscribed automatically after this one email, making a link pointless.

The reason for this is really for mass emails. It really should not apply when you send a few hand-written emails to a few people.

Also, any suggestions on which host to use to send these emails?

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