Oh, it’s absolutely spam, by definition. That said, that’s a wide spectrum. I don’t generally like TV ads, but the State Farm ones with Patrick Maholmes and Andy Reid are funny and I don’t mind them. Kind of the same here: it’s spam, but if there was ever one that’d get a response from me, that would be it.
> Unsolicited commercial email -- "UCE," or "spam," in the online vernacular -- is any commercial electronic mail message sent, often in bulk, to a consumer without the consumer's prior request or consent.
It’s often in bulk, but needn’t be to meet the definition of Unsolicited Commercial Email, aka spam.
I’ll lay it on the line. In the many years I ran mailservers for a living and for a hobby, I was elbows deep in fighting spam. One of the consistent patterns over the years was that spammers would go to elaborate lengths to explain why their spam wasn’t spam. If it’s unsolicited commercial email, it’s spam.
Again, there’s a wide spectrum from v14gr4 p1ll5 to a legitimate vendor in my job space reaching out to me. They’re not all alike. But if it’s commercial, and unsolicited… it’s still spam.
I agree with you -- I don't like receiving cold emails on my work email address, and I treat such emails as spam. But I don't think it can be configured as spam from a law standpoint; but this is just my opinion, IANAL.
> Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.
That doesn’t specifically mention spam, but it does indicate how strictly regulators define what they consider to be commercial email. And if it’s unsolicited commercial email, i.e. UCE… it’s spam.
I think the definition of spam necessitates some level of bulk sending, and I struggle to consider ~fifty emails over the course of two or three years "bulk".
I'm quite sure you can do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid thinking of yourself as a spammer.
Here's my basic criteria for spam:
1. It's unsolicited.
2. It's trying to sell something / exploit people.
In my grading scale I classify you as a spammer. A "bespoke" spammer perhaps, but I still do not want to waste time reading anything you send me, or waste time even clicking "mark as spam", unless I ask for it. You would be stealing my mental CPU cycles (which are few and precious).
No. I'm drawing a distinction between “I want to sell you something” and “click this link to a website that strongly resembles, but is not, YourBank to transfer all your money to us.”
I remember an old boss launching a product this way - he read the spam law and while I don't remember the specifics, sending an unsolicited email to people whose emails you obtained legitimately was okay if you weren't explicitly selling something (which I think is very open to interpretation).
So if the same qualitative factors were kept for your outreach, just an increase in the quantitative equation means it's spam? One discrete instance is not spam but the combination of all of them makes the whole spam, when certain thresholds are reached? If so, how do we define those thresholds?
