the border between spam & and a legitimate email offer

Hi Neil,

so what u say is in any case i cant email a person without is permission ?
if i go into a site and use the contact form or email to send an offer to the admin or owner, isn't it getting a permission to send him an email?

i m contacting him, as he allowed me too, i m not talking about mass email ripping from site contacts, i m talking about going to each potential client site and use his form for asking him if he needs a service of some kind.

that's only a thought, because if i can't do that, it makes it a lot harder to get that client somewhere else.

Spam is just an easier way for saying Unsolicited Commercial Email.

Which means you cannot email people with commercial offers who have not given you permission to do so.

Now, if someone opts-in to a list your are creating with a contact form, they have given you permission to send them email.

If someone forgets they opted in, this is not spam. If someone doesn't like what you are sending them (the offers, content, etc) this is not spam.

They can unsubscribe or delete the email.

The reality of the situation, however is different.

If you use a service to manage your list such as aweber, the receiver of email has most of the power because they can click that good ol "this is spam" , "this is junk mail" , button any time they feel like it. Even if the email they are clicking it for technically doesn't fall under the category of spam.

The email services have to protect themselves first, so if enough people "complain" about your email by hitting the "this is spam" button instead of doing what they really should do and either unsubscribe or hitting the delete button...the email services will come down on you not the lead who shouldn't have clicked their "spam" button.

This service may force you to use confirmed opt-in or some other similar penalty. If your spam rating goes high enough, they may just cancel your account altogether.

So, it seems, from peoples laziness to look for an unsubscribe link, or the misunderstanding of what unsolicited commercial email really means...everyone is suffering.

Business who sell products through online marketing have a harder time getting their email to get through spam filters.

Consumer lose some good offers they may want, but will never see because spam filters are eating the emails.

Even regular people may never see a personal email because a spam filter may think it is spam because of how sensitive the spam filters have become.

So unfortunately, everyone suffers.