Cheapest web hosting - Mailing List Ethics You should know about a
Mailing List Ethics You should know about a couple of ethical issues when dealing with the world of mailing lists, namely spam and opt-in/opt-out. This section represents our personal soap box for airing our opinions about them. A Word About Spam With the advent of the computer, mailing lists have been brought to a whole new level. Now you can be (and no doubt are) told on a daily basis that Candy really wants you to visit her Web site, and that a little blue pill will solve all of your personal problems. Yes, occasionally an e-mail sits in your Inbox informing you of new job postings, new posts on PHPBuilder.com, or tour dates for Jimmy Buffett. But we think you know what mailing lists are primarily used for: spam! For those of you just crawling out of a suspended animation chamber, spam is a term used to describe a shotgun approach to advertising. You simply send your e-mail advertisement to as many people as you possibly can, in the hopes that a certain small percentage of them will actually respond. What is our point? SPAM is a luncheon meat. You spell it in all capital letters, and you enjoy it on your sandwiches. Spam is another name for UCE, or unsolicited commercial e-mail. It is spelled in all lowercase, and we shun it. The bottom line: Don t use mailing lists to send spam. Your mother would be very disappointed. Opt-In versus Opt-Out You may have heard these terms before. What do they mean? To most of your users, probably not much. They simply answer the questions on your registration, read the fine print (as all users do, of course), and click the Submit button. However, you aren t a user any more. At least, not on your own site. You are the administrator. You need to understand the difference between opt-in and opt-out because it may mean the difference between annoyance and acceptance for your users. Opt-in and opt-out are fancy ways of saying What is the default choice for your users? Opt-in means the user is not currently scheduled to receive a specific newsletter, but he or she may opt to subscribe. Obviously, opt-out is the opposite your user will automatically receive notifications unless he or she opts to remove him- or herself from that mailing list. Why the difference? As the administrator, you may sometimes have to walk a fine line between satisfying your advertisers (the ones giving you money to keep your site alive) and your users (the ones visiting your site, keeping your advertisers happy by driving up the number of hits). If an advertiser pays you enough, you might agree to automatically send advertisements from that company unless the user explicitly chooses not to receive them (opt-out). However, you might have a newsletter you send once per week that contains, for example, details of comic conventions throughout the country (or even the world). Not all visitors to your site will be interested in that, but if any are, they can subscribe to the newsletter so they will always be notified (opt-in). 514 Chapter 14
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