Joe Rubin, director of public and congressional affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disagreed. "I wouldn't be upset to see a cheap airfare e-mailed to me," he said. "If Sears sends me an e-mail regarding a discount on a lube job at Sears, that's something that most consumers probably won't be upset about."
[news.com]
Sorry, Joe. I have to disagree.
If you send me email to offer me a discount on a lube job, I want to know "How did you get my email address?"
An opt-out policy ought to take into consideration how the email address was obtained. There are three possibilities: (1) This email address is private. It's unpublished. I give out this email address to only a handful of people. (2) This email address is public, but only to humans who send a message. It is not public for robots that automatically harvest email addresses, store them in a database of millions of such addresses, and send out millions of messages at a time. (3) This email address is public to anyone who wants to send me a message, with no restrictions.
If people take reasonable steps to keep their email address either private or protected from the harvesting robots, aren't they already indicating that they wish to opt-out? And what if an email marketing company sends a bulk message to such an address? Can they be sued for not honoring opt-out?
Posted by Doug Sauder at July 11, 2003 12:08 PM