On 16 Apr 2002, at 15:08, Jim Lynch wrote: > ...when a company whose main product we're talking about on this list and we > all use sends you details of a related product, the free version of which > you may well have downloaded from their website. Isn't 'Spam' when the > sender is truly anonymous and you are completely mailed at random? A much > more serious matter.
Spam is generally defined as "unsolicited commercial email." The key point for Andrew is that it was UNSOLICITED. He did not ask to receive such email, and, therefore, Code should not be sending it to him. One of the annoyances of most such downloads is that you have to register with the site and set up a user account. In doing so, you are generally offered the opportunity to opt out of their spam email, but in my experience, the option is almost always TURNED ON. That is, you have to do something affirmative (uncheck the check box) to not be spammed. This is fundamentally dishonest. One should not be able to accidentally opt in to a mailing list. The default OPT IN = YES setting leads to a lot of people inadvertantly signing up for the mailing lists and then receiving email they don't want. The result is that the senders often get a bad reputation with those who've inadvertantly opted in. Because of that, it seems obvious to me that it makes much more sense to have the default be OPT IN = NO, so that you don't end up alienating your customers. And then you know for *certain* that the people who've asked to receive the email really do *want* to receive it. That, it seems to me, would make that mailing list 10 times as valuable as the one populated with lots of accidental subscribers. BTW, anyone with a Yahoo account should get to their Yahoo account setup quickly, as Yahoo has recently implemented a whole boatload of marketing settings, and turned them all ON by default (regardless of your previous settings). These include PHONE AND ADDRESS (if you have them in your account profile). -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
