3 ms·

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 peopl

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.

peteforde 16y ago
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.
- rubyrescue 16y ago
  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...
  - peteforde 16y ago
    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.
    - ericabiz 16y ago
      "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.
      - peteforde 16y ago
        Totally fair. I did say "millions" but I concede to your point.
    - rubyrescue 16y ago
      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.
      - peteforde 16y ago
        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.
raganwald 16y ago
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.
hartror 16y ago
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.
- peteforde 16y ago
  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.
il 16y ago
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.
- nostromo 16y ago
  Correct. But to be fair, it's a Canadian domain, and the article linked to a report on the Canadian equivalent of Can-Spam.
- peteforde 16y ago
  It's factually wrong for any country that isn't Canada. I'm Canadian, but thanks for stopping by!
  - aaronbrethorst 16y ago
    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?
    - autarch 16y ago
      I live in Minnesota, and I have high hopes that in the future Minnesota will secede from the US and become part of Canada.
      - aaronbrethorst 16y ago
        People out here in Seattle say something similar :) http://zapatopi.net/cascadia/ 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_2010 http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201007306418.pre-decision_201...
prodigal_erik 16y ago
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.
- jat850 16y ago
  What? I can only hope this is a joke.
- CapitalistCartr 16y ago
  "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.
- dmoney 16y ago
  They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer. I'd be interested to hear the argument for this.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    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.

peteforde 16y ago

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.

rubyrescue 16y ago
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...
- peteforde 16y ago
  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.
  - ericabiz 16y ago
    "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.
    - peteforde 16y ago
      Totally fair. I did say "millions" but I concede to your point.
  - rubyrescue 16y ago
    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.
    - peteforde 16y ago
      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.

raganwald 16y ago

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.

hartror 16y ago

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.

peteforde 16y ago
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.

il 16y ago

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.

nostromo 16y ago
Correct. But to be fair, it's a Canadian domain, and the article linked to a report on the Canadian equivalent of Can-Spam.
peteforde 16y ago
It's factually wrong for any country that isn't Canada. I'm Canadian, but thanks for stopping by!
- aaronbrethorst 16y ago
  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?
  - autarch 16y ago
    I live in Minnesota, and I have high hopes that in the future Minnesota will secede from the US and become part of Canada.
    - aaronbrethorst 16y ago
      People out here in Seattle say something similar :) http://zapatopi.net/cascadia/ 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_2010 http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201007306418.pre-decision_201...

prodigal_erik 16y ago

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.

jat850 16y ago
What? I can only hope this is a joke.
CapitalistCartr 16y ago
"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.
dmoney 16y ago
They're doing more harm to our civilization than the average thief or killer. I'd be interested to hear the argument for this.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  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.