Definition of Spam

It’s Time to Change the Definition of SPAM.

There is a massive difference between commercial bulk email marketing and being labeled a SPAMMER. European organizations like Spamhaus would like every ISP and Domain registrar in the world to agree that their definition of being labeled as a “Spammer” is simply:

–A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.–

Unsolicited Email is normal email
(examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)

Bulk Email is normal email
(examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

(Source: http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html)

If your caught by Spamhaus sending any form of unsolicited bulk email, they will blacklist both your ISP’s IP addresses as well as blacklist your physical domain name URL (effectively this is a death sentence for any normal website because this means 99.999% of all web hosting companies will not host you at this point for fear that their IP ranges will also be blacklisted because your simply on their servers). They don’t care if you’re a legitimate business trying to promote yourself or if your intentions are noble. They don’t even care if your 100% in compliance with The Federal Can-Spam Act! To them it is simple, if it’s email thats unsolicited in anyway, your guilty and banned from the internet. I could not disagree with this more. While I will admit that the original intentions of organizations like Spamhaus were good to begin with (like targeting illegal gangs trying to infect computers with malicious viruses and helping to stop sites that contain child pornography as an example), However, I think it is completely outrageous to put small businesses trying to promote their services through bulk email marketing in the same category as illegal spam gangs, hackers and child pornographers. This is wrong and that is why we need to change the very definition of Spam itself.

One of the most important things for you to understand about sending unsolicited commercial bulk email is that the United States Government and the Federal Trade Commission passed a law in 1993 called The CAN-SPAM Act. This law makes it perfectly legal to send anyone unsolicited bulk email as long as you’re in compliance with the particulars of the law. Mainly there are 7 things you need to do to be in compliance with this law if you wish to send out massive bulk email.

They are:

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

If you’re a legitimate business trying to conduct business on the internet, these guidelines will be very easy for you to follow. If you’re a scammer then you’re not going to follow these rules and you should rightly be labeled as a spammer and promptly blacklisted so none becomes a victim to your potential scam.

The issue of Spam has become a topic that is considered almost Taboo for small business owners trying to earn a profit from the internet. I have read many articles on the internet from people claiming that it will ruin your business’ reputation, that it could harm your rankings on Google, that it will totally upset your core audience and so on and so on. This is complete and utter nonsense. I have countless testimonials from people that say that commercial bulk emailing was the very thing that transformed their business and took it to the next level. I have personally made fortunes from bulk emailing. I have never made more friends and have had more paying clients in my life than when I had before I started sending commercial bulk email. I get to spend time with my family every day, I am completely debt free, I make a solid seven figure income and my livelihood is not dependent on my local economy (meaning I can move my family anywhere in the world and as long as we have an internet connection, I will always be in a position to make money). Most people dream of having this type of financial freedom their entire lives and I am honored and privileged to be living this daily and it is all possible because I have learned to master how to send massive commercial bulk email. As a business owner if I was without bulk email, I would be forced to pay millions of dollars in advertising costs if I wanted to promote my business to the number of people I know it takes to maintain my income. There is nowhere in the world where for the price of a few hundred or thousand dollars I could directly advertise my business to millions and billions of potential clientele (save the fact that by some act of God you somehow were to be freely promoted on a major television network, which will almost never happen to the everyday small business owner).

In a recession, small business owners are being forced to adapt new marketing strategies because the old ways of doing business are what’s killing their business. This is where commercial bulk email comes in and can totally help save these companies from economic ruin because for only a few hundred dollars these companies can literally advertise their business to over a million people a day (that form of mass advertising for the cost has never been accomplished in the history of our civilization). That’s why it is so important for ISP’s to stand up for small business owners and marketers that pay for the very systems that keep them in business and stop penalizing them because a foreign organization like Spamhaus defines their view of Spam as anything that’s unsolicited.

If organizations like Spamhaus wish to continue to be legitimate companies on a quest to rid the internet of scammers and hackers, I have come to the conclusion that the very definition of Spam needs to be changed from, “anyone that sends unsolicited bulk email of any kind” to the following:

SPAM means: Anyone willfully neglecting to abide by the Federal Can-Spam Act in an attempt to infect, harm, scam or otherwise hijack a person’s computer for any malicious purpose that is against the intended recipients (or affected parties) wishes. (Affected Parties meaning: an individual, company, ISP, hosting company or server).

Since there is a war being fought RIGHT NOW over this very definition, I am asking that every person that reads this article to please forward and share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, your ISP, domain registrars and local news organizations. Please spread the word. The more people that begin to understand that Commercial Bulk Emailing is perfectly legal and that the definition of Spam is for the Scammers and not for the legitimate business owners and marketers that greatly benefit from commercial bulk emailing. It will increase your ability to proudly email your vision to the greatest number of people that can help take you, your business and your website to the next level.

Thank you so much for supporting us and helping to spread this word. Feel free to contact us anytime if you have questions of how you can start sending out commercial bulk email TODAY!

Sincerely,

Joshua Greenwood

Owner of SendBulkEmail.net

*Update. After reading my article, Spamhaus Decided to put me on their ROKSO list even though I have never been terminated from one ISP (their rules to be on that list state you have to be terminated Verified from 3 ISP’s). I guess they think they can simply bully us around simply because we’re deciding not to play their game and are willingly teaching people how to send massive commercial bulk email. Well, that’s not going to stop us anytime soon, we believe it’s the right of all business owners to  advertise their businesses by any means necessary as long as they do not break the law or hurt people in the process. Call me a Capitalist but I am standing firm on your right to promote yourself, even if that means sending unsolicited bulk email.