Zeus wrote:
Spanky,
Sending one email to 100 people does not make you a spammer. You have to spend out thousands of emails. The orginal sender of the emails are usually hard to pin point because they hack into other peoples servers to send their emails. By law if you send out mass emails you have to inclose a note at the bottom of te email to unsubscribe to future mailings.
Zeus
Read the CAN-SPAM act. One unsolicited email makes you a spammer under Federal Law. It's a real joy to work under.
Also, you be shocked how easy it is to trace spam back to the originating server. It is embedded into every email. Email headers can be forged but the originating server won't be. The thing with most spam these days isn't coming from traditional mail servers. Instead it is infected PCs with broadband connections with a simple SMTP server running that spammers use to bulk out their garbage. Read up on Botnets once, the biggest one bulks out something like 20 million emails a day. The owners of these botnets sell out their services to companies looking to send out the spam email. This makes them a tidy profit for doing almost nothing.
Now, is Hotel Freebird a spammer? No. In fact, I went back and read his TOS and Privacy Policy posted on his site. He was within the law because it states that he can use email addresses collected to forward information about his business. It also gives information on how to unsubscribe from future mailings.
Instead, they guy just messed up on the mailing as he did it manually instead of using a third party email marketing service that hides addresses and so on. It happens and he apologized. I also have exchanged PMs with him and offered up a few suggestions to avoid this happening to him in the future.
Cheers!