As a evangelist for GroupMail, I talk to many people who express concerns about whether or not they will be considered spammers when they use a bulk email application. To that end, I thought that it is important to clarify the definition of spam and reiterate the part that bulk sending, regardless of the application used, has to play in the equation.
Spamhaus provides a pretty good definition of spam. Here’s an excerpt:
The word “Spam” as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”). Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as a part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
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)
On this blog, we discussed how one of the world’s largest supermarket chains, Tesco, used email marketing successfully to bolster sales by 31 percent. They were certainly sending their messages in bulk (20 million emails sent to customers each month during the campaign.), but they were not spamming.
Why?
Because they were sending their messages to recipients who opted-in, or subscribed, to receive messages from them during the campaign.
In short, using a bulk email application has as much to do with spam as any other standard email software (like MS Outlook, Outlook Express) or web application with which you can send more than one email using bcc or multiple addresses in the To: field. Sure, you can use a bulk email application to spam, sending unsolicited messages to recipients who didn’t give you permission to contact them. You could spam using any off-the-shelf software or web-based email programs. The major spammers worldwide probably use very sophisticated delivery engines to process the millions of messages that they send each day.
But bulk email applications are more often used to legitimately send email to customers or subscribers who gave the sender permission to contact them. The Tesco example above provides evidence of how effective email marketing can be.
For more on the permission side of email marketing, read Newsletter Subscriptions: Do You Have Permission?
