Sending Unsolicited E-mail Across State Borders?

Not a lawyer.

To my understanding, spam is spam (or call it unsolicited email in the guise of relationship email marketing) wherever it comes from. If you send emails to the US, one has to abide by CAN SPAM. If an email fails, it goes to the spam inbox. If you are a repeat offender, your IP and domain get toasted by spam monitoring sites and email providers. You can't apply Czech laws since your email recipient is not in Czechoslovakia.

Most definitely! Unless you are on a private server account, they probably forbid what you want to do because it utilizes too high a level of their server resources.

Cheers. - Frank

I would really discourage you from doing that by any type of automation. If you really are going to only be sending tens and up to 100 a day, then just do it manually, and use the business sites' own contact form to do it when you can.

Personally, however, I can tell you that you will have much more success doing cold calling than sending unsolicited emails.

Take the legal issues out of it. Whether or not it's true, let's just go with the assumption that either (a) it's legal for you to do what you want to do or (b) because you live outside of the US, it's unlikely you'll get prosecuted. (I'm not saying I agree with the above, but let's just ignore the legal arguments for the time being.)

But the legal issues aren't the only problems with your plan.

There's also a concept some of us use to judge our plans and ideas called ethics. As in, yeah, maybe what I'm doing is legal, but is it right? You seem to think your email won't be spam because some of your targets might be interested in your offer. But how is that different from any other spam whether it's a penis enlargement solicitation or a phishing scam? Clearly some of the targets are interested in the offer or these large spam houses wouldn't be operating. But the definition of spam has nothing to do with whether people are interested in the product. It's called unsolicited commercial email for a reason, so if it is (a) unsolicited, (b) commercial and (c) and email, it's spam. Period. And regardless of how great you might think your lists and offer are, even great email campaigns would be absolutely thrilled to get a 10% conversion rate, which means that at least 9 out of 10 people are going to be likely to press that spam button when the get your message.

Speaking of that spam button, apart from ethics, you have another problem: technical issues. You're absolutely right that nobody wants to touch your UCE, from SMTP services to VPS providers. And there's a good reason for that: they want their own mail to continue to be delivered. Because there's often more that happens when someone hits that spam button than just deleting the email. Usually that email is reported to various anti-spam services. It's then might be parsed for the content or the sender, and it'll certainly track the SMTP servers that delivered it. And if these SMTP servers cause enough problems, they'll get a red flag next to them which will make it harder for the messages to get delivered -- perhaps even completely banning them in some cases (though it's always up to the email provider to decide what action -- if any -- to take).

What that means is that even if there were no legal issues, even if there were no ethical issues, and even if you could find a provider who would let you set up your own SMTP servers, your plan still probably wouldn't work because you'd have a hard time getting your messages delivered. At first, your messages would be scrutinized (or filtered) because they were coming from an unknown, untrusted SMTP server. Later, they'd likely be blocked because of all your spam complaints.

My feeling on spam is that if your offer is that good, there are better ways to reach out to potential leads than one that will most likely piss them off -- even if they're interested in your product. On the other hand, if your offer isn't that good, spamming is probably not going to give you much benefit anyway.

Hi Gene,

Thanks for your reply. As far as I'm aware most VPS providers do not allow what is called UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email), even though it is permitted by the U.S. law.

Also, I don't think that if I was sending email from an American VPS it would change the situation described above at all - if the receiving email server was in Brazil, it would not matter that the outgoing email server is from the USA, in my opinion.

Monthy

I'm sensing a disconnect here. I get the distinct feeling that most of the people responding have very little experience with B2B marketing in the real world. I'm not counting micro businesses marketing to other micro businesses, which is most of the IM/MMO market.

That said, I would advise against bulk emailing of boilerplate emails. Follow the CAN-SPAM regs, and you should be okay legally. But bulk emailing is usually not all that effective.

Better to do a custom outreach program. Treat the UCE as advertising, in much the same way one would use banner ads to attract people to an opt-in page.

Create your lead magnet (white papers still work well in B2B) and use the cold email to ask permission to send the link to the bribe, and to provide additional info.

If they say yes, send them the link to your landing page. Capture the email, and proceed.

If they say no, thank them for their time and refer them to an article on your site which provides no-strings value related to your freebie. If they click through, you get a second chance to offer the freebie for a signup.

As for cold calling, it has its fans. I'm not one of them, but it's personal. I just find the sifting and sorting process to be soul-sucking. If I have to do it for more than a day or two at a time, I find myself finding any excuse not to do it. So I developed ways to accomplish the same thing without having to smile and dial.