Kill Them All! God Will Know His Own
I’m so glad my heresies on targeted commercial email have so quickly attracted the attention of those self-appointed inquisitors of unsolicited commercial email, CAUCE (the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email). Their executive director Neil Schwartzman left the following comment on my article Don’t Fear CAN-SPAM or PIPEDA With Targeted E-Mail:
“This is hilariously misguided. I have won several PIPEDA cases. Anyone who follows this person’s advice gets what they pay for and more. A potential slap from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. They would very much be spamming”
His way of thought on unsolicited commercial email reminds me of a legendary quote made during the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate the Cathar heresy in Southern France. When a Church leader, the Pope’s legate Arnaud-Amaury, was asked by a Crusader how to distinguish the Cathars from the Catholics, he answered: “Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” – “Kill them all! God will know his own.” An estimated 200,000 to 1,000,000 people were massacred during this crusade alone.
Schwartzman perfectly exemplifies the systemic prejudice, the myopic, reductionist thinking existing today I named my company Heresy for. He’s the type who would burn me at the stake while beating his breast with self-righteousness before God if he were a Crusader and I a Cathar. Fortunately, today he and his ilk can only threaten with “potential slaps”. That’s because there’s nothing wrong, illegal, immoral or undesirable about responsible, targeted commercial emailing.
Schwartzman was interviewed on Canadian television about spam and predictably expressed completely black and white views on unsolicited commercial email. He fits in perfectly in a mass media setting because (like the typical journalist) he loves building up and tearing down houses of cards. He loves bringing people down, spreading fear and prejudice with overblown rhetoric while prescribing gallant remedies, all the while posturing valiantly for doing so. In the interview he equates any sort of unsolicited commercial email with anathema, calling anyone who does it “the bad guys” who want to “steal your bank accounts”, with no distinction made from companies selling products via email which are “of course all fake”, companies with organized crime ties, particularly the “Russian Mob”. On the other hand, for him the “legitimate senders” are brand name companies like “Canadian Tire and Bell Canada”. When the interviewer asks Schwartzman how much of spam are real products from legitimate companies and how much is criminal activity, he dodges the question, instead talking about the sole imprimatur of legitimate commercial email being a person’s consent (IE permission based, opt-in email). The prejudice of today.
The true acid test for legitimate commercial email is not a person’s consent. It’s whether they find that commercial email interesting or not. No one calls a well-timed, well-targeted commercial email spam.
January 12, 2009 at 12:44 pm
No, I didn’t dodge the question. Legitimate companies don’t spam, nor do legitimate companies buy into your ignorant claptrap about it not being about consent. As to your conclusion, “No one calls a well-timed, well-targeted commercial email spam.” my only hope is that whatever customers you have who should follow such poor advice hold you personally and professionally responsible when they are sued under CANSPAM and PIPEDA, and then find a real deliverability consultant who knows the law.
In the meantime, those of us with actual experience in the industry will continue to monitor this blog, and use it for its actual purpose, for laughs. I gotta tell you pal, there are several who are watching, and smirking. You are so offbase, it is mind-boggling. You can wrap yourself up in the notion that what you say is heresy, the rest of us call it spam, as do recipients. As does the law.
January 12, 2009 at 1:35 pm
“No one calls a well-timed, well-targeted commercial email spam.”
I do. If you did not obtain my consent directly or via a partner who has my consent and permission to share with partners, then you spammed me. Whether you like it or not, the acid test *is* consent and permission.
January 12, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Telling people it is okay to send bulk email without consent runs afoul of the interests of two necessary intermediaries that business people need to utilize to get their bulk email delivered, the bandwidth provider and the receiving network.
Under the bandwidth provider’s terms of usage, you are forbidden from sending bulk email without consent.
The receiving network has an acceptable use policy which applies to those wishing to use its servers to deliver bulk email to its customers.
This policy strictly prohibits the use of their servers for the purpose of transmitting bulk email without consent to end users.
Why is all this important? The cost of accepting, handling, transmitting and delivering bulk email is primarily borne by the receiving network.
Now ask this question:
“Would you like to wake up one morning to find that someone painted the side of your house with an advertisement and did so without your permission?
Would you decide to ignore the fact someone had tromped all over your property rights because the advertisement was “timely and targeted” to the interests of those passing by?
No.
Well that is exactly what a business person does when he decides to send bulk commercial email without consent in the belief that the intended recipients will want the marketing message because he thinks it is “timely and targeted.”
It is not okay to use someone else’s property, being the servers of the receiving networks, to transmit unrequested advertising, because you think the ultimate recipients may want to know about the product or service you are marketing.
Faced with this bald abuse, receiving networks can and will call this type of messaging spam, refuse to deliver the spam, while block listing the IP addresses transmitting the bulk email and the domains in the messages, so causing you untold grief, harm and damage.
Why? People do not like unacceptable intrusions upon their privacy. That is exactly what you are doing when you send marketing messages by email in bulk without consent.
You may wish that because you think your bulk commercial emails are well timed and targeted recipients will welcome your messages with open arms.
However, without consent you are spamming and the recipients will simply label you a spammer.
A business person can not justify breaking his contract with his bandwidth provider and abusing the property interests of the receiving network simply because he thinks his bulk marketing messages are “well-timed and targeted.”
For those not familiar with sending bulk commercial email, a good place to start would be to review, learn and apply the guidelines set out in the Message Anti-Abuse Working Group Sender Best Communication Practices found at http://www.maawg.org/about/MAAWG_Sender_BCP/MAAWG_Senders_BCP_Ver2.pdf.
January 12, 2009 at 4:02 pm
you state:
“No one calls a well-timed, well-targeted commercial email spam.”
i am someone, and i call a well-timed, well-targeted commercial email spam if i did not ask to hear from the sender. there are millions of persons just like me.
my inbox, and my custom, are under my control. like many intelligent people, i actively refuse my custom to those who intrude on my space with unsolicited communications of any kind. quite aside from the legal consequences of spamming, there are financial and marketing disasters awaiting anyone so naive as to follow your advice. the analogy with the history of Catholic theology is strained. calling your screed “heretical” presumes a grandeur hardly warranted by the subject. you’re not a heretic, and there is no orthodoxy against which you are heroically struggling. no lives nor souls are at stake, and what you write has been written hundreds of times before by hucksters and their apologists, although often with less fluff. your lengthy bloviations, complete with allusions to 13th century France and featuring the requisite Latin quotation, bring to mind my father’s wisdom: “No matter how thin you slice it, or how high you stack it, it’s still baloney.”
January 13, 2009 at 10:48 am
As the old saying goes”
“They laughed at Fulton, they laughed at Edison, and they laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
January 13, 2009 at 1:16 pm
In this response you are picking in one particular answer your post got by saying:
“Schwartzman perfectly exemplifies the systemic prejudice, the myopic, reductionist thinking existing today [...]”
Yet you fail to address the very important point that what you call “systemic prejudice” is essentially a posture adopted by those who have to bear with the cost of transporting, processing, storing and retrieving the “well-timed, well-targeted” (yet unsolicited) email you advise.
Laws and regulations aside, service operators will keep on applying the policies and controls that their respective businesses require, based on their customers’ requirements.
Luckily for all, I’m sure the market forces will act, making those who decide to follow this advice, irrelevant.