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I’m not sure if your comment is meant to defend the practices of the companies I’m referring to - maybe you work at one of these spam houses, I won’t judge - bu

I’m not sure if your comment is meant to defend the practices of the companies I’m referring to - maybe you work at one of these spam houses, I won’t judge - but frankly, I don’t care what the definition of CAN-SPAM is. Clearly everyone thinks they CAN-SPAM me and I’ve never heard of anyone actually being fined under any anti-spam law except at the highest, most absurdly industrial volumes of spam. If my email is public because it’s in a Git commit or a Gravatar or even an intentionally public “email” field in my profile, that is not consent to send me unsolicited, automated messages followed by a multi-day campaign of emails guilt-tripping me for not responding to the first one. Maybe they have an unsubscribe link at the bottom. I don’t know, because I don’t open unsolicited emails that may contain malicious zero-days targeting my device. But if they do include the unsubscribe link, it doesn’t make me think any better of them and it doesn’t absolve them of any moral wrong-doing. If you’re a founder or employee of a company that revolves around sending automated emails to non-customers, just be aware that your target market is a group of self-anointed “hustlers” who send unsolicited email messages to people who slowly grow to rightfully despise them. If your “marketing database” is a scraped list of emails, you should delete it and shut down the company. In the future, consider using your skills to work on problems that have a positive impact on the world.

legitster 4y ago
In most of my professional career (B2B), we didn't use any scraped data in our marketing system. We relied strictly on opt-in forms or in-person event data (some gray areas existed here). However, you've unwittingly touched on one of the philosophical divisions that exist in most organizations between Marketing and Sales: Sales departments in general have a much more "liberal" idea of who is email-able. The idea being, "what's the rule against me just emailing someone about something"? Well, you give a mouse a cookie and before you know it Sales has an entire email automation system to themselves. So if you look at an expensive sales tool like Outreach or Salesloft and ask, "what's the difference between this and a normal email automation tool" the answer is a lot of money and a lot of looking the other way. So to give you a window into the politics of a GTM organization, most companies keep kind of a curtain of plausible deniability between their "inbound"/optin-based marketing and their outbound sales systems.
- soco 4y ago
  This is something legislation could fix. Harvesting emails for spamming from GitHub commits is not much different from taking parked cars for a joyride: they might be in the open, but not for you.

legitster 4y ago

In most of my professional career (B2B), we didn't use any scraped data in our marketing system. We relied strictly on opt-in forms or in-person event data (some gray areas existed here). However, you've unwittingly touched on one of the philosophical divisions that exist in most organizations between Marketing and Sales: Sales departments in general have a much more "liberal" idea of who is email-able. The idea being, "what's the rule against me just emailing someone about something"? Well, you give a mouse a cookie and before you know it Sales has an entire email automation system to themselves. So if you look at an expensive sales tool like Outreach or Salesloft and ask, "what's the difference between this and a normal email automation tool" the answer is a lot of money and a lot of looking the other way. So to give you a window into the politics of a GTM organization, most companies keep kind of a curtain of plausible deniability between their "inbound"/optin-based marketing and their outbound sales systems.

soco 4y ago
This is something legislation could fix. Harvesting emails for spamming from GitHub commits is not much different from taking parked cars for a joyride: they might be in the open, but not for you.