On Thursday, January 20, 2011, 1:31:50 PM, Bowie Bailey wrote: > On 1/20/2011 4:17 PM, David F. Skoll wrote:
> When you sign up for a company's email list, you get whatever they > decide to send you. If they decide to start sending marketing to the > list, I would not consider that spam because they own the list and they > can decide what to use it for. The recipients signed up to get that > company's emails and if they no longer want to receive them, they can > unsubscribe. And as I said before, if the unsubscribe function doesn't > work, then the emails become spam (regardless of the actual content). Yes and no. If you sign up for Joe's Bagel Company mailing list to find out about the latest Bagel news, and some new marketing guy joins the Bagel company and starts sending marketing messages about Bananas to that list, then the original purpose of the list and what you thought you signed up for has been corrupted. Most people would consider the latter to be spam, and rightly so. OTOH if the Bagel company decides to send non-Bagel messages to a Bagel specific list, then one knows exactly: 1. Who to blame 2. Where to unsubscribe 3. What went wrong etc. So at least there is a responsible party to hopefully act on unsubscriptions, fire the spammy marketer, etc. It's sort of a degenerate case of the degenerate case of email addresses going to to a third party, except it's the same party. Spam is easy. Ham is hard. Cheers, Jeff C. -- Jeff Chan mailto:je...@surbl.org http://www.surbl.org/
