On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Anne Wainwright <anothera...@fables.co.za> wrote:
> I recently sent an invite to an unknown third party. Normally I agree with Brad Knowles on this kind of thing, but this time I can't go 100%. People regularly do make contacts with third parties that they have not previously met, with the intent of arranging mutually beneficial activities. Heck, if you think about it, that's what you're doing every time you make a first post to a mailing list. There is nothing wrong with that in general, and there is nothing (morally) wrong with that when done by email, to recipients carefully selected for high probability of getting some interest. (From this point of view, "double opt in" is just a useful, fail-safe litmus test for recipient interest, not the moral imperative some seem to think it is.) Obviously you think your mailing has passed that test. That said, it's bad business IMO (except in cases like a double opt-in mailing list where every person has explicitly indicated interest in receiving list posts). What *you* think isn't what really matters. When done by mutual acquaintance, by phone, or even by form letter, there are significant costs to making such contacts, especially when you do the phoning yourself. You must really value the recipient to go to such expense, even if small. There are no such costs to email, which means that using email as a medium puts you in company with some real scum, who send out unsolicited email indiscriminately, sometimes laden with malware or phishing URLs. It's unfair, I suppose, but I'm not surprised if you get classed with the scum on the basis of the only information the recipient has about you as a businessperson: an email that they didn't ask for. There's another problem. The ISPs are a pretty quick-on-the-trigger bunch, too, as a couple of posters have noted. But if you're not running a double opt-in list, you're not going to be able to get them to change your minds about your list. Everything I know about them, they'd rather lose half their clients' mail than get a complaint about spam. And their customers are not well-informed enough to doubt the ISPs when they blame somebody else for any problems with mail. Except spam -- it's obvious to the customer that the spam is bogus, why is it so hard for the ISP? You see their incentive, I suppose, and it works against legitimate businesses unless they follow the ISPs' rules. I conclude that for an honest business, anything is a better way than email to make first contact with a third party who doesn't know you. Regards, Steve ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org