Question of the day: Is Spam legal?

The strict answer, at least if you're in the United States, is no.

But 'strict answer' implies there's a lot of wiggle room, and when it comes to the legality of unsolicited marketing email, that's basically the case.

Wiggle Room issue #1: US Laws don't apply to foreigners.
If you live in Las Vegas, and you sell beauty products online, sending out a bulk email to 1m people who haven't asked for it is illegal. No two ways about it. But if your email comes from a company registered in the Dominican Republic, and the mail is sent from a server based in Paris, US law simply can't do anything about it. Oh sure, if the Feds could work out that you were the one that ordered the spamming, they'd come after you with everything, but more often than not, if you're smart, there's no trail that will lead to you if you're doing everything overseas, in the name of companies that don't exist in the US.
Of course, pulling a stunt like this is pretty ruthless, and we'd advise against it, but until every nation on the planet outlaws spam, there will always be a country where it's legal.

Wiggle Room issue #2: If people expressed an interest in your product, it's not spam.
Well, strictly speaking it still is, but if you can show the people you're emailing to asked for information, or put their name on your mailing list intentionally, then you can send them anything you like.
Of course, ruthless people take this to extremes, taking any opportunity to class a stranger as 'interested' when they're not. Leave a message on a Star Wars bulletin board? That will tell a spammer that you have 'expressed interest' in spam for Star Wars toys.
Now, you know you haven't, but what are you going to do about it... sue?

Wiggle Room issue #3: If they can unsubscribe, it's not spam.
Again, this is bogus rationalization, but unfortunately, when George Bush put his signature to the 'Can Spam Act', he put in a little loophole that says if the spammer allows you to unsubscribe, then the email is clean from illegality.
The problem is, more often than not, when you unsubscribe from a junk email list, the spammer will take your response as evidence that your email address works, and is read by you closely enough that you would respond to his note. That means your spam will increase ten-fold just as soon as he can sell your address to someone else.
So unsubscribing is not only a dumb thing to do, it's a trap that both lets spammers off the hook, and allows them to increase their spamming actions.

Wiggle Room issue #4: They can't stop everyone!
And they can't. If you spam 40m people every day for three weeks, and only 15 people buy your product, earning you $150 in commissions, you'll probably get away with it, even though you've cost society and business thousands in bandwidth, annoyance, labor and stress. And that's why many spammers do what they do - because though the profits aren't always big, the costs are negligible, and the risk is even less.

Wiggle Room issue #5: At what point does bulk email become bulk?
If I sent an email advertising car insurance out to 15 people in my address book, would that be considered spam? What if it was 150 people? What about 1.5m?
The point where an email to friends becomes actual spam is open to debate, and in fact many convicted spammers weren't just sending out emails to people they thought would be interested in products, they were sending them out to every single email address they could find.
Spam, in most people's mind, is an email sent to someone who doesn't want it. But is an email about an online dating service, to someone who is desperately lonely, a piece of spam or a lifeline? Where is the line between beneficial and annoying? And if you think it's hard to figure that question out now, imagine having to prove your answer in a court of law!

The bottom line: Spam sucks. Just don't send it.
When you go to leave a comment on this page, the 'word verification' box you have to fill in is there because spammers leave fake comments on blogs everywhere with links back to their websites, and they leave these things in the thousands with 'robot' software. In fact, within an hour of this blog having been started, we were deleting spam comments.

Basically, spam is really annoying, and it never makes you look professional or trustworthy. Most spammers would say a conversion rate of 1 in 1000 is a total result for them, with even more saying that 1 sale in 10,000 emails was worth the trouble.

The problem is, that one sale comes at the expense of 9,999 people who will now hate your product and company for having bothered them. If you're selling 'Tan-Through T-Shirts', maybe that's fine by you. But for most of us, spam is the single most hated thing we have to deal with in a day.

If you must engage in email marketing, do it smart. Make sure your lists are focused, so the people getting your message really want that message. Make sure you're giving people information they can use and a quality product, so that they at least see some benefit from your intrusion.

People who can be trusted are people that customers are happy to do repeat business with, and repeat business is where the big money is at - not one-off sales of penis enhancement cream.

posted by Oz @ 3:56 PM