Spam Free

You receive an unsolicited offer by e-mail for 100% Business Opportunity Seeker Addresses. The word opt-in is all over the offer. What do you do?

If you have any sense, you’ll report it. If you have been SPAMMED with an offer for opt-in, you can be absolutely sure that the addresses on that list are harvested without the permission of the targets. In other words, if you spend money on that list and send your offers to it, YOU will lose your accounts for spamming.

However, the real issue is not one of content. Even if all commercial e-mail was truly targeted and all e-mail marketers sold legitimate products, we would still be inundated with countless numbers of unsolicited advertisements. Right now, most ISPs have strong policies prohibiting their customers from spamming, and when they receive the hundreds (or thousands) of abuse reports that result from each incidence, they will either warn the spammer or immediately cancel his account. Imagine what would be happening right now if this were not so and UCE was an acceptable form of internet marketing.

The only acceptable form of e-mail advertising is called opt-in. This is when you SPECIFICALLY REQUEST that a company put your name on their mailing list. And this is only acceptable if there is a good confirmation process to determine that YOU - and not somebody trying to get either you or the marketing company in hot water - are the one who actually submitted your e-mail address. Right now it’s very common for morons to submit other people’s e-mail addresses to opt-in lists either as a joke or an act of revenge.

Why is spam so annoying? Quite simple:

The currently overwhelming amount of spam is an annoyance to everybody. How would you feel if a parade of salesmen came knocking on your door every day, and most of the same ones kept coming back time after time? Or if your phone rang all day and night with sales calls? Would you put up with salespeople jumping in front of you waving sales flyers in your face every time you walked down the street? Isn’t unsolicited e-mail just another version of this type of rude intrusion?

If you have made your e-mail address public by placing a classified ad, or if you have inquired about a specific offer that interested you, or if you have participated in a newsgroup or a chatroom, or even if you simply have a webpage with your e-mail address on it, your name has been harvested, placed on e-mail lists, and sold indiscriminately to internet marketers.

Even if you have not in any way expressed an interest in any products or services, you will most certainly find yourself the victim of spam.