Mass emailing - legalities ?

[cellweb]

Hopefully a simple question.
If a client wants to make it known to his potential customers (photographers) that he has a new ecommerce website , is he ok to try and gather as many emails from their websites as possible and then bulk email them ?

Does that break any type of 'spam' law ?

[Jason L]

My understanding is that as they are business to business then this is OK (n.b. you are not allowed to do this B2C). But you have to make sure you provide them with an opt-out.

[fisicx]

No but your host may block your attempts to do so. Much better to use an emailing service such as aweber.

I'd also estimate your chances of success are just about zero for two reasons:
1. Most sites obfuscurate their email addresses so it's going to be a slow manual process.
2. Any unsolicited email like you propose will go straight in the junk mail folder along with the 1000s of others received every day.

[MartCactus]

No but your host may block your attempts to do so. Much better to use an emailing service such as aweber.


Good advice.

But also note that many ISPs won't let you promote your site hosted with them via unsolicited bulk email, even if the emails are sent via a separate system.

You'll also find many of your emails probably don't make it through anyway (since most people don't like spam, so will have systems to attempt to block your email to them).

Personally I think you'll get better results sending them something in the post, a well designed post card type mailer will always get me to look at it. Whereas cheesy sales pitch letters and emails I always find an instant turn off.