Sending sales material to people who have actually sent queries to your sales department doesn't seem nearly as bad as spamming random people
And it's all not nearly as bad as sending me spam for horse pron websites. You can rationalize it however you want. Still doesn't make any of it cool. Why didn't the person I'm already in an email conversation with ask if I wanted to be on the list? Because they know I'd say no (especially when the conversation turns to the fact their company can't do anything for us). That's what makes it opt-out bullshit.
It's not something that gets me hot under the collar, even at it's worst it was a minor nuisance I dealt with over coffee. But after a year having a published address and 4 years of fallout afterwards, I've heard all the bad rationalizations for spam and they don't stand up. I have a polite and friendly "fuckoff" form letter for people without unsubscribe links. The second time I have to send it I CC the technical contacts in the domain's whois record. When someone gets upset or angry at me for doing so, I know damn well that they know they're lying when they try to justify their spam.
I did say "as long as there's a clear, and working, way to turn the sales emails off if you don't want them".
"It's not something that gets me hot under the collar"
Dude, you're emailing the domain's technical contacts, who likely have no say whatsoever in company sales policy. That sounds pretty hot under the collar to me.
Dude, you're emailing the domain's technical contacts, who likely have no say whatsoever in company sales policy. That sounds pretty hot under the collar to me.
Eh, I never thought of it as that big of a deal, just another task at work where something needs to happen or stop happening, and I only have a handful of routes to take. If asking the sales contact to stop didn't work, it turns out that most people don't make public the contact info for the sales managers' boss.
I'm not going to play cooperate politics somewhere I A) don't work B) have no ability to contact anybody with control over any policy and C) even if they were publicly accessible, don't understand why spamming isn't cool. It easy enough just to contact the dudes running the infrastructure used to spam me. And because they're techies and not salesmen they're actually nice people and already know this kind of behavior is unacceptable emailing. They might not have control over the policy, but they have something I don't: access to the people who can fix the policy or at least get me off the list.
It was actually the nice alternative to calling my netadmin. He was a very good admin, the emails would disappear from my inbox instantaneously, but when he checked the spam filter and marked true positives, his scripts made people wind up on email blackhole lists.
And it's all not nearly as bad as sending me spam for horse pron websites. You can rationalize it however you want. Still doesn't make any of it cool. Why didn't the person I'm already in an email conversation with ask if I wanted to be on the list? Because they know I'd say no (especially when the conversation turns to the fact their company can't do anything for us). That's what makes it opt-out bullshit.
It's not something that gets me hot under the collar, even at it's worst it was a minor nuisance I dealt with over coffee. But after a year having a published address and 4 years of fallout afterwards, I've heard all the bad rationalizations for spam and they don't stand up. I have a polite and friendly "fuckoff" form letter for people without unsubscribe links. The second time I have to send it I CC the technical contacts in the domain's whois record. When someone gets upset or angry at me for doing so, I know damn well that they know they're lying when they try to justify their spam.