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Spam 101

Protect Your Business and Ours.

Help Us Fight Spam (Illegal E-mail Marketing)



What is spam?


Spam is any e-mail sent where the recipient is not expecting to be contacted or does not know the sender. This lumps 99% of all marketing e-mails into the category of spam. Many of Earnware's users do not know what the true definition of spam is, whether or not they are spamming, or that spamming is against the law.

Spam threatens our business and our customers' businesses because ISPs like AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo block potential spam offenders. Just one of our customers can get our entire company's e-mail servers blacklisted. That means all e-mails from our servers will be blocked if there are too many spam complaints to an ISP about e-mails from our users. Therefore, to protect your business Earnware has a zero tolerance policy for spam.


How do I know if I am spamming?


If you meet any one of the criteria on this check list you are spamming illegally:

  1. I purchased my list from a list vendor that generates generic leads for my offer. The leads have not been verified by the lead generation company or myself by phone to be expecting an e-mail.
  2. My leads were verified by phone, but they were sold to other people as well.
  3. My lists are over 7 days old.
  4. People on my lists are not expecting to be contacted by me or do not know who I am.

When is it okay to spam?


Never. Spam is illegal and considered unethical by the general public.


What are the consequences of spamming?


If people complain to their ISPs or to us that your e-mails are unsolicited (spam), the following things can happen to you:

  1. You may have to pay up to an $11,000 per e-mail fine by the federal US Government.
  2. Your company's name will be blocked by major ISPs (AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo) not only for e-mails from you, but by any sender that puts those words into an e-mail. Your actions can affect thousands of other people if they are in the same business as you.
  3. Earnware's mail servers (our IP addresses) can be blocked by major ISPs causing our business and that of our customers to lose lots of business.
  4. Earnware can take you to court to repay financial damages caused because our company's e-mails were blocked.

What kind of mass-e-mails can I send?


It is okay to send mass e-mails to your friends, family, current customers, people with whom you have a current relationship, or people who have asked to be contacted by you. Things such as e-newsletters, a training series, etc. are okay as long as the recipients explicitly asked to receive e-mails from you.



How does this affect my business?


During the Internet boom of the late nineties and early this decade, e-mail marketing became popular because it was an inexpensive way to reach large groups of people. It was so effective that too many marketers started doing it and now everyone receives hundreds of unwanted e-mails clogging up their inboxes every day. Consumers started complaining to their e-mail providers (AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) who in turn started blocking advertising e-mails. Essentially the e-mail marketing industry destroyed itself. E-mail is no longer a valid, legal, or ethical form of cold marketing. If your business is dependent on e-mail marketing, this does affect you because you will need to find alternate methods of advertising. However, this is not a policy Earnware invented. It is something the general public requested and there are now laws in place banning it.


What is Earnware's policy on spam?


Earnware’s position regarding spam is that it cannot and will not be tolerated. Our official policy is as follows:

Any users who receive three spam complaints in a one-month period are subject to having their accounts suspended for one week. A second offense can result in a two-week suspension. A third offense may result in termination of the user’s account. Additionally, if someone averages two complaints per month for six consecutive months (twelve complaints in a six month period) he or she may be suspended. Earnware reserves the right to adjust this policy at any time and users outside of the above parameters may still be suspended if believed to be spam offenders.


What is permission-based e-mail?


Permission based e-mail is the only form of legal and ethical use of commercial e-mail. It means you have explicit "permission," hence the name, to e-mail that person.

Permission Based E-mail Checklist

Only permission-based e-mail addresses can be used through the Earnware Business Center. If your list does not meet every item on the checklist below, your list may be illegal. Therefore, you are prohibited from using Earnware to contact any members of that list.

  1. My list is permission-based. Recipients have explicitly asked to receive communications from my business or me, or it is a phone verified business lead generated within the last seven (7) days asking to receive communications from a representative about my specific business, and/or I have a direct business relationship with the recipient.
  2. My list is a purchased list of e-mail addresses of people that have responded to a specific ad about the service I would like to promote to them.
  3. My list is NOT a large database of random e-mail addresses, collected in a variety of ways, of people that are not expecting to be contacted about my promotion.
  4. My list does NOT contain captured or harvested e-mail addresses obtained by surfing the Internet or "scraping" web pages.

I use purchased lists, but the lead vendor provides opt-in dates and IP address for each email address. Can I use these if they are "double opt-in"?
 

Beware of rented lists and only work with reputable sources. Rented lists are the #1 source of spam complaints. Certain list providers will, unfortunately, lie to you. They will tell you that their leads are double opt-in and highly cleaned, but often they are not telling the truth. Just because they provide opt-in dates and IP addresses does not make the list legit. For example, the people on that list may have registered to win a free iPod and then they end up on a home business opportunity list. Contacting these types of lists is illegal and unethical.

Many lead vendors are squirrelly; although there are a few that are reputable. They all claim they have the best, freshest, double-opt in, cleaned, surveyed leads. However, if you do the math none of them could possibly generate the millions of leads they each claim to have because there just aren't that many people on the Internet filling out forms (for business opportunities, for example) each day. They would go through the entire U.S. population in a year!

Most autoresponder e-mail software companies do not allow any purchased or rented lists to be used with their system. Due to the nature of Earnware's customer base our policy is only slightly more flexible. Lead providers who have registered with Earnware Corporation and passed our evaluation of their lead generation practices confirming the list members want to be contacted by e-mail about a specific offer and do not sell those leads to more than one person ever are acceptable at this time. This policy may change as commercial e-mail rules become tighter.

These types of truly legitimate leads are expensive to generate. Depending on the industry they can average between $3 and $12 per lead. For business opportunity leads the cost to generate a truly legitimate lead is generally between $5 and $10. If any company is selling leads for cheaper than that, beware because it is not likely they meet the quality standards of a true, ethical lead. Generally these high quality leads are not profitable to e-mail cold anyway. It is best to use the old-fashioned phone call or snail mail.

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