On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Cyndi Norman wrote:
> Given that they are running a mailing list (announcement
> only) for their customers, is my assessment of their choices
> off the mark? Do note that they send this newsletter to all
> of their customers for whom they have an email address (and
> now their fees are lower if you give them an email address)
> and don't ask permission first, let alone about preferences
> for HTML or attachments. They also fax a version out but I
> finally got removed from that list since they were calling at
> 2 in the morning when my fax-modem/computer was off.
Sending unsolicited faxes is illegal in the US under federal law.
There is a fairly stiff penalty per incident (a few hundred bucks
as I recall). Do a web search on "junk fax" is you want more
info.
Sending unsolicited emails is not illegal. Sending unsolicited
email is called spam. Most Internet service providers have
strict policies against spamming. Because of this, many spammers
steal services by secretly directing their spam through
unprotected email servers to conceal the identity of the spammer.
If this company is sending unsolicited email, I would contact
their ISP and complain. If you don't know who they get their
Internet services from, I can help you track this down.
As for the size of their emails and the choice of using the HTML
format, I consider this rude, clueless and arrogant. Doesn't
make good business sense to tick off your potential customers.
There are a few unusual mailing lists that regularly distribute
large attachments. I would expect a warning that the list
distributes big files and hope that they had a no-attachment
subscription option.
BTW: 800k for a single photograph is absurd. A 100k Jpeg will
produce a large sharp photograph. They must have sent a bitmap
file.
- murr -
