How To Convince My Boss Not To Spam?

An anonymous reader writes "The small travel agent that I work for recently received an email from one of our competitors with several thousand of their potential customers in the 'To:' and 'Cc:' fields. My boss now wants to use these addresses to send unsolicited advertisements. I would like to convince him not to do this, as I believe that this practice is morally wrong and legally dubious. However, morals don't go very far in the business world, so I'm asking Slashdot: what business-oriented arguments can I use to dissuade my boss from spamming?"

Comments

Simple Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Cut of his balls and sned parts out to his family

Re:Business is war,weakling ! The business Gods RA

[Yetihehe]

I have my own company, and if this happened to me I would be working this gift from God HARD.

<flamebait>Another example religious people are not better than atheists</flamebait>
Sorry, I couldn't resist, it's so funny.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

These customers have signed up for email from the competitor, as long as you don't send massive amounts of it, hearing about specials wouldn't hurt much. Just follow some reasonable guidelines.

1. Only send emails once in a while.
2. Allow users to opt out of YOUR mailing list.
3. Don't send emails that expose everyone else's.

However, I'd opt for the plan of not spamming and instead replying (BCC everyone) from your travel agency asking your competitor what they are doing about keeping email addresses secure. Point out that security should be paramount in any business and that you'd NEVER send out emails that gave away personal information. I would also point out that you offer european cruises for 10% cheaper than they do.

cheers