Re: UKNM: Re: Charity e-fundraising

[Nick Sellors]

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:30:40 +0000, "Charles Linn"

<

charleslfoe [dot] co [dot] uk

> wrote:


>General advice on e-mail lists seems to be "don't", and yes I can see the

>pitfalls.  This mailing has raised an interesting point for me, which is when

>is unsolicited email unacceptable?

>

>All respondants to my mailing have implied it is always unacceptable on first

>consideration, but this is not my direct experience within FOE.


Charles, I don't mean to be heavy-handed here but, yes, Unsolicited

Commercial/Bulk Email (UCE/UBE) is *always* unwelcome and I can

guarantee that someone *will* complain and then your ISP is in the

unfortunate position of having to apply its AUP - this is completely

provider-independant as any reputable ISP will do this and you

wouldn't want to touch the unreputable ones, trust me.


>Whether you think they are a good idea or bogus, email petitions are fairly

>popular within Friends of the Earth and I have sent of many messages to various

>targets encouraged by an initial mailing from the likes of WWF and Amnesty.

>Neither I nor my collegues object to this even though it is unsolicited.  I

>wonder if home users object more as their email service is not free but they

>have to pay for a connection.


There's an element of that, yes, but its about "abuse" of shared

resources - the internet is a collaborative venture, after all.

Let's say you sent a 10k email to, for instance, all of Demon's

250,000 nodes - that's 250,000 x 10k = 2,500,000,000 (2.5 GB) bytes

in total extra on the UK internet alone. All it takes is one of

those 250k people to complain and you have a problem.


>How about if the mailing to them did not directly ask for money, but advertised

>a service? e.g.

>

>"Find out about environmental problems in your area, how they affect you and

>what you can do about it at www.blah.blah.


Its not about the content.



>The question

>is, is it possible to avoid pissing anyone off from a list, even if it is

>targetted and they are already charity givers


If you do this, you *will* piss people off, I can guarantee you

that. Apart from anything else, most of them will get so much UCE

that they won't even read it, let alone do anything about it.


>and is that risk so high that it

>cancels out the possilbe bennefits of letting a very large number of people

>know about a free service you provide?


A free service that you're (effectively) charging them to advertise.


Bottom line - if someone sends me UCE/UBE I won't buy anything from

them, I won't visit their website and I *will* forward the mail to

their ISPs abuse department.


I doubt I am alone.


N.

-- 

Nick Sellors			http://www.derby.org/

PGP Key on Request		Tiocfaidh Ar La !

Views expressed are mine and mine alone, not my employers


********************

UKNM is sponsored by Excite UK, visit us at http://www.excite.co.uk.

Email Khalil Ibrahimi

khalilexcitecorp [dot] com (mailto:khalilexcitecorp [dot] com)

 to advertise on Excite.

********************

Change your UKNM subscription use http://www.chinwag.com/uknm.html