How To Comply With A Total Failure

from the um...-don't-spam dept

There was a conference yesterday all about the CAN-SPAM law, where speakers took turns either bashing the law for being a total failure - or telling people how to comply with it. Of course, for the most part, the people looking to comply with it, aren't spammers - but companies that already send out emails and are suddenly afraid that they're going to get in trouble. The article also mentions (thankfully!) that just because you comply with CAN-SPAM it doesn't mean you should spam people. Though, the reasoning presented was a little suspect. They point out that if Nordstrom's spammed people, all anti-spam programs would block them and they would have killed off email as a marketing channel. That's true. However, a much better point would have been that if they had gone and spammed people, many people would be incredibly pissed off at Nordstrom's - and, generally speaking, pissing off everyone you're trying to market to isn't the greatest technique for building a sustainable business. In the meantime, the FTC still won't say what they're doing to enforce CAN SPAM, and my spam count keeps going up.
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  • identicon
    Tony Lawrence, 23 Jan 2004 @ 12:01pm

    When spam is outlawed, only criminals..

    When spam is outlawed, only criminals.. or something like that.

    I killed my mailing list (only a few hundred people) because I don't want to deal with this. I bet a lot of legitimate small lists are doing the same, but the real spammers just keep on trucking..

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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