Dammit, boss, I don't WANNA be a spammer!

I’m a web and database developer for the marketing department of a local utility company. My manager is a youngish, open-minded guy with vision, enthusiasm, and, in general, a knack for making the right choice and successfully defending that choice to the old-ish corporate Luddites in upper management.

In the past he’s given me a huge amount of leeway in developing and maintaining our online payment and account history app, to say nothing of a generous budget, and has been quite willing to listen to me when it comes to suggestions for new features and expansions of same.

Today, however, this productive and enjoyable atmosphere was sullied by our first serious disagreement.

It has previously been our policy to advertise our service via inserts in the monthly utility bills to our customers, and this policy has been both reasonably successful and (as far as we know) entirely inoffensive. Our sole experience with mass e-mail was limited to existing subscribers to our service, who provided their addresses to us with the understanding that we would not sell or share them (which we haven’t), was done solely for the purpose of announcing a slew of major new upgrades to our service, and was NOT sent to users who had chosen not to receive advertisements. I was a little leery of this idea, but I let it pass - after all, they’d explicitly provided us with their addresses.

Yesterday, bossman was contacted by one of the many companies - and I use that term only because ‘soulless, bandwidth-leeching, inbox-raping fuckchimps’ would take too long to type repeatedly - which compiles and sells lists of e-mail addresses for the express purpose of sending unsolicited ads. The idea here is that they will provide lists of e-mail addresses matched to the street addresses of customers in our service area, from which we’ll select those that are NOT currently signed up for our online-billing service, and we’ll then send them e-mail pitching our site. Wholly unsolicited e-mail, in other words; the bane of users, the mark of the marketing beast.

He says it’s one-time only; he says it’s cheaper and more effective than sending postcards to people who might not even HAVE a computer; he reiterates that we’re not charging for the online billing service, so it’s not as if we’re really selling anything. He then asks how it’s really any different from the leaflets we’ve been stuffing into the bill envelopes for years.

Dammit, it IS different! Bill inserts aren’t widely known for pissing people off! When was the last time you saw a news story about people complaining en masse about a bill insert!!! How many sites and organizations are dedicated to the idea of eliminating bill inserts??? Use a leaflet in a bill, and at WORST you get indifference – the leaflet gets tossed in the trash and ignored. Send somone e-mail they didn’t ask for advertising a service they’re not interested in, and the reaction can be (and often is) far more negative.

Boss, you’re a good guy. I know your heart is in the right place, I know this whole project is your baby, and I understand that now more than ever you need some really impressive ‘new subscriber’ figures to show the bean-counters. But I’ve put my heart and soul and time into this as well, and I don’t want our site to be associated with spam!

So I ask you, o wise denizens of the SDMB…is this just me? Am I over-reacting to this situation? I know a great many of you are sick of spam - as am I - and are likely to be biased against it, but that’s the point I’m trying (badly, it would seem) to make to my boss: the online community that tends to hate spam is the very community he’s trying to reach with it, and the net result might be an aversion to our service rather than an interest in it.

I need some good, solid arguments against this idea, because those I made above aren’t getting through to him. Are they, in fact, failing because I’m wrong? Am I being a knee-jerk reactionary and taking the anti-spam thing too far?

:confused::frowning:

Damn the hamsters.

Sorry for the double-post.

If I have the time, and I receive SPAM advertising a product or service from a company I recognize, I will go to their website and locate their customer service email address. I will then write them an email in forceful but not obscene or profane language explaining that neither I, nor my family, nor anyone whose opinions I influence will ever, ever, do business with them again, for daring to presume to invade my private address space.

Sometimes the monkeys in customer service respond. Yesterday one said "we didn’t send it to you, it was one of our affiliates - and we require our affiliates to provide a way to unsubscribe.

Clueless[sup]2[/sup].

AmbushBug

My thoughts are that it is ok to object and put forth your arguments. Let your boss hear them and mention his thoughts. If he decides to do it anyway, that is his choice. Just do it (as long as legal). If you really object, start sending out the resumes.

No good will come to you if you argue with a boss who has heard your side and decided to do it anyway.

This happens to me nearly every day. I am a data analyst (statistician) and I am asked somtimes to do some analysis that I do not think is ‘valid’, usually as a consequence of low sample size. My boss(es) know that I will object and put a note in there about why I don’t think it should be used but if they chose to ignore it, that’s their choice. I’ve seen people canned for standing up to much for what they think is not a correct decision but it wasn’t their decision to make…

I’ve been in your position, although without the selling of email addresses.

I used to work for a company that bought email addresses, and collected them off the website/via phone contact. They then sent out one sales email every other week.

You better believe I was all over the Unsubscribe list. That part of the job I could have done without (the email list, I mean). But, I wasn’t in a position to object.

IANAL, but depending upon where you live, it may be illegal, since you do not have a pre-existing relationhip with the proposed recipients. http://www.spamlaws.com/state/summary.html Generally you can send email to your customers, or through another sender to people who have said that they will allow themselves to be sent emails from third parties, but not just a list of random email addys. And you need a way to unsubscribe, and it has to be valid, not any of this “they clicked on the unsubscribe, that’s a live one! Spam em!” schtick.

Find a thread that shows posters reactions to spam, or what they do with it when they receive it. Show it to him. You couldn’t ask for a more varied polling audience than the folks on the SDMB. Personally, I never open anything that is in my junk mail folder. I see emails from my phone company, my cellular provider, my cable provider and numberous other companies that I have chosen to do business with in the past. I still don’t bother to open them.

Show him the websites dedicated to fighting spam and make sure he understands that his company name will be associated with this garbage.

The bandwidth-leeching, inbox-raping fuckchimps trying to sell this idea to him are only presenting him with one side of the story. Show him the other. Tell him that most email providers have filters set up to field unsolicited email.

Good luck!
Syl

A lot of people are going to be really disappointed when they open that e-mail that says ENLARGE YOUR PENIS NAKED CHEERLEADER FARM ANIMAL SEX!!! 78306 and it turns out to be just some boring thing from the utility company.

Thank you for the address, Gaudere. I forwarded the relevant info to him, and I’m hoping the fact that laws actually exist concerning this will give him pause.

Interesting point since the original discussion: I overheard him mentioning to someone else that we were to pay the fuckchimps a few cents per ‘valid’ email address, and we would be refunded for any addresses that came back as invalid.

This led me to wonder if an address reported as being invalid would be removed from their databases. I asked the bossman and he said they hadn’t mentioned it one way for the other, but it’d seem logical that they would - after all, if they knew it was invalid, why would they keep it and sell it again down the road, eventually necessitating a refund to a future purchaser?

If this is the case, it might be worth getting the list from them just to send some huge percentage of them back as being ‘invalid’…

They will get themselves on lists of spammers and then people filtering via blacklists will not see valid communications from the company.

I use mailwasher www.mailwasher.net and that checks all my mail against several lists, known spammers are bounced. If I used a webmail address with spam blocking and your company got itself on the spammers list I would not see your announcements even as an opt-in customer unless I knew you were on the spammers list and made an exception.

This is a very bad idea, it will piss off potential email subscribers to your services as well as possibly cut off those who wish to receive email from you. There is no winnning here for anyone.

If I were to receive unsolicited commercial email from you, it would most likely be caught by my spam filters and I’d never see it.

If this were not so, I would move it to a mailbox called “filterfodder” and when I got around to it I would create new filters for everything in “filterfodder” that has slunk past existing filters.

I would never ever, under any circumstances, set out to do business with a spamming company.

Explain people like us to your boss. Explain that more and more netizens come to embrace our attitudes.

apotheosis,

IMHO, what’s even worse than receiving spam from a company that they know is what’s going to happen to all the e-mail addresses that your vendor has recently acquired. John Doe just received his first spam message ever and it’s from his utility company, which has mildly agitated him, but he’s willing to overlook it this once. He then starts receiving e-mails from your vendors other clients, some of them not quite so innocuous. Guess who he’s going to assume is giving out his e-mail address?

Thanks to all for the support and suggestions.

Thylacine’s mention of the blacklist filters is a point I hadn’t considered, and hits particularly close to home since we do have legitimate mail that we send to customers who request it (bill notifications, etc.); it’d suck for those to start disappearing because we’d made a bad name for ourselves.

He’s not entirely clueless as bosses go, and I think that in some vague sense he understands the general hatred towards spam. I think the big problem lies in that he just doesn’t percieve this proposed action as being spam.

I really think he means well, but his back’s against the wall to produce enough subscribers to justify the continued funding of the project. I hope I can talk him out of this; but with the tech market being as it is I can’t afford to make some valiant, principled stand that’d end up costing me my job.

grumble I should’ve stayed in the IT department. I still tell my mother I’m a janitor so she won’t be ashamed of me.