Resisting the Lure of Spam

The message in your email inbox offers to send your advertising message to millions of qualified or "opt in" email addresses for a few hundred dollars. Compared to the cost of outbound telemarketing or direct mail, this is an insanely low price. The temptation to use "the power of email marketing" can be almost overwhelming to a promotion-minded businessperson on a tight budget. But resist this temptation you must, because the proliferation of Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), colloquially known as "spam," has become an ugly, cancerous growth on the face of the Internet.

It is easy to tell yourself that you are not a spammer just because you send a couple of emails to a few million strangers that your message, unlike all the email junk you get, is of vital importance to at least some of the people who will receive it. But you are wrong. You are still sending spam. Indeed, most people who have used the Internet for any length of time have learned that the phrase, "this is not spam," in the body of an email means that it almost certainly is spam, just as a sign at a nightclub's door that says, "no motorcycle club colors allowed," tells you the place is a biker hangout.

Perhaps if unsolicited commercial email had been used more widely by major companies making legitimate offers when the Internet first went commercial, it would be accepted (or at least tolerated) and not be derisively known as spam today, but this did not happen. Just as the U.S. "900" telephone billing arrangement was originally intended to let legitimate information providers charge for their services as part of users' phone bills but was co-opted by porn services almost immediately and tainted forevermore by that association, the first major users of bulk email promotion were pornographers, multi-level-marketing hustlers, "chain letter" swindlers, hoaxers, and other dubious characters. If you send spam, you are forever associating yourself with these people in potential customers' minds.