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How To Convince My Boss Not To Spam?

Posted by kdawson on from the engendering-ill-will dept.

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?"

8 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. Teach him by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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;
  2. Business is war,weakling ! The business Gods RAGE by assemblerex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:my $0.02 by aproposofwhat · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My option?

    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
  4. Tell him tt's a trap by DCFC · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Tell him tt's a trap by InfoHighwayRoadkill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Many companies who sell lists of addresses either postal or email add in seed addresses. In theory you only "rent" the list not own it. So if they see mail coming to their dummy addresses x years in the future they will know who kept the data after the rental limit.

      There are even dummy addresses in the white and yellow pages to prevent unscrupulous businesses sending the phone books to somewhere cheap to get them copy typed into a database. If you ring the number no one answers but your caller ID is recorded. If you send them mail thats checked too. How do I know this. A company I used to work for got caught doing just this.

      --
      another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
  5. Re:my $0.02 by Chapter80 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As others have said, this technique works great. But the way it worked well for me was to reply as if you are doing a personal reply to the original sender, and accidentally pressed reply all. This is best done if it's immediate. Like:

    Bob- Thanks for the info.

    On another note, I wanted to let you know that we released Rev 2 of our software package for lawyers, and just finished three successful implementations. All three are thrilled with the productivity gains and want to act as reference accounts.

    If you know of anyone legal firms looking to improve their productivity, let me know. And we're still interested in the partnership idea that you guys mentioned. Let me know where that stands.

    For best results, change the address of the original sender (your competitor) slightly, so he doesn't even get it. But to all his customers, it looks like he did.

    This technique is proven!

  6. Re:my $0.02 by gmack · · Score: 5, 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.

  7. Re:my $0.02 by smilindog2000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.