Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Simply tell him that, usually, spam is filtered and deleted automatically. Once he sent a sufficiently large amount of spam, the filter will filter away the legitimate e-mails too.
Here's some of the stuff that's likely to happen to your company if it sends those messages:
* Your mail server will be added to blacklists. Legitimate messages you send later may disappear with no indication that they have done so, causing endless frustration and possibly lost money.
* Complaints may reach your web site's hosting provider, who may take it offline. Seriously: this happened to one of my clients once. This does happen.
* Some recipients are likely to be annoyed and may decide to never do business with your company. The long-term costs of this could be significant.
* Depending on where you're based, this could be illegal under either protection of privacy laws (e.g. the UK's Data Protection Act) or anti-spam laws (e.g. several state laws in the U.S.). Your company may receive a hefty fine because of it.
So, at the risk of blowing my karma for the next 200 years:
Either do the job or quit.
Seriously. You got hired to do his bidding, if he wants to spam let him reap the consequences, make careful note of your objections. Then also admit you're a tool.
And if you can't live with that then grow some backbone and quit. There has to be other employment for someone with your skills.
MP3 Search Engine
1. It's an abuse of personal data, since the owner of that data (the individual) did not opt in. In many countries (particularly the UK) this is illegal and can land you in a lot of trouble.
2. If you're a small company, your reputation is going to be worth a lot more than one or two customers who may answer your email. Doing something that's at worst illegal and and at best irritating is hardly going to help your reputation.
3. Business ethos and ethics matter. As a consumer, I often know that dealing with a small company could cost slightly more than buying from a large one with economies of scale. However, I may feel it is worth it if the service is better or if I identify positively with the company. I have broken off relations in the past with companies that marketed too aggressively. This is entirely rational behaviour and not something limited to techies who "get" spam and are over-protective of their inboxes.
Cheers,
Martin
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, available from Packt Publishing.
I would argue that for his business, the effort and risk involved makes sending unsolicited mail a losing proposition, that the hidden costs of setting up and maintaining the mailing list makes it non-profitable. Sending unwanted mails is not like distributing flyers, not even like unsolicited telephone calls, as there is less chance of getting past filters.
If you're the computer guy, I would tell him that it's an idea that the agency should only explore after Projects X, Y, and Z are done, as they have a better chance of generating new business at less cost. Then let it die from neglect.
The things you see when you don't have any mod points :-(
Anyway Absolutely spot on, a competitors mailing list is marketing golddust, you could probably get a lot of sales data without too much hassle, emails going to the same company would be a good target indicator. Google API searching with the email domain could winnow out the people with websites (
...but actually I think it's insightful. We keep getting such stupid mail, too, and I've done exactly what you suggest, with good results. ;)
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
> gmail's spam filtering beats Thunderbird's handily
And in this, we see an faint echo of the enormous power in the information that Google collects:
1) They have a lot more training data
2) They can make a comparative analysis to catch large batches of largely identical messages which arrive at their servers within short time periods
Oh, definitely do something like the "accidental 'reply all'" strategy:
Hi George! I see that you decided to go ahead with the spam advertising approach despite the risks. More power to you. We've definitely dropped that idea... it is too likely to piss off our core of loyal clients.
We're still doing the 'traditional quality' thing: trying to arrange the best possible tour packages for each price point. It is not a 'get rich quick' approach, but we're all making a good living at doing what we like to do, and that counts for a lot.
Our company has decided to back off on those talks about some kind of partnership with your company. We think that our corporate values are too different from yours for that to work out, at least for now.
Looking forward to seeing you again at next year's trade show! If they have it in the same place, we could share lunch again at that italian restaurant with the excellent menu.
[Sign with title, company name, etc]
Also definitely move the mailing list into a database of some kind, so you can cross reference it with your client lists. If a significant portion of your clients are on their mailing list, then you might have a problem of some kind. You might also use this as one source for building targeted mailing lists, but it wouldn't be wise to use it directly. See next point.
Tell your boss that the people on this list have already seen junk email from the competitor and are likely to regard anything you send out as just more junk email, so normal spamming would actually be counter productive. This is especially true since undoubtedly other businesses are harvesting these addresses, and will be pumping out spam to these people.