This is the trouble with email communications: Everybody is so sensitized due to the onslaught of offensive spam that even something completely legitimate gets painted with a broad ugly brush. I have seen the email of people that have signed up to receive a newsletter go completely berserk simply because the frequency of messages exceeded what they considered reasonable. They didn't just unsubscribe. They went into a lengthy vicious rant that questioned the genetic makeup of the list manager.

I hate spam. But some of these people really need to lighten up a bit. I get about 60 spams a day that make it through the corporate filter (it stops over 100 a day) and it really only takes me a few minutes to clear my inbox of it. It also helps the temperment to use an email reader that won't display HTML unless you ask it to. That way I don't have to see the real nasty stuff before I delete it.

IMHO you aren't spamming anybody with your newsletter. You are performing a service that I would guess that most of the receivers would consider valuable. The ones that complain must not really be interested in selling your stuff.

Regards, Ralph Mackiewicz
SISCO, Inc.

 

With regards to the question by Alex Pavloff, I don't think that what you are doing can reasonably be called "spam" for several reasons.

1) You are sending e-mail to a limited number of specific people, not to a collection of random e-mail addresses you bought from a spam supplier or harvested using spam software.

2) You have an existing and continuing business relationship with these people.

3) The e-mails are being sent to people who are highly likely to be interested in your products. If your own distributors are not interested in your products, then you have much more serious problem than whether your e-mails are "spam".

On the other hand, I think you have a duty to make sure that what you have to say to them is useful and interesting and not just something you had to turn out to meet your monthly marketing quota. In this regards, the quality of the writing is as important as the quality of the information.

I don't know what you are sending to your distributors, but I would like to make a general comment on some of the non-spam commercial e-mails I do receive. There are a couple of companies which send massive e-mails laden with live links to their web site. I like many other people have a rather slow and decrepit computer at work, and a corporate internet connection that often seems to be funneled through a damp string.

These multi-media wonders drag Outlook to a virtual halt for an annoying length of time. My main concern when I get these sorts of messages is how to delete them as quickly as possible so I can regain the use of my computer.

I find this annoying, but it certainly isn't spam. I have done business with these companies, and would be interested in what they had to say if their way of saying it wasn't so inconsiderate.


On Wednesday 19 February 2003 07:35 am, Alex Pavloff wrote: <clip>
> Thanks for all the responses, which pretty much confirmed what I thought.
> Now for another question. My company has email newsletters and we send
> these newsletters to the sales guys at all of our distributors. These are
> people that have our equipment on their line cards.
>
> Now, we're not selling enlargment techniques here -- a sample newsletter is
> a "Look how easy it is to plug Eason Technology stuff into XYZ Foobar
> stuff!" with a short app example.
>
> However, every now and then a sales guy at one of our distributors will
> call this spam. Quite frankly, in this case, where the guy is selling our
> product working for a company that has signed a distribution agreement with
> us, I don't think this is spam even if the guy never personally opted-in to
> this list.
<clip>

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Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
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