Unsolicited Commercial Email Policy
Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail
Unsolicited commercial e-mail, sometimes known as spam, is e-mail that is normally of a
direct sales/solicitation nature sent to one or more e-mail addresses on the Internet
without the recipient first requesting or authorizing the communication. It also includes
posting of articles to the Usenet in newsgroups not meant for that type of use. E-mail of
this type may also be known as unsolicited broadcast e-mail or unsolicited bulk e-mail.
UCE can also include unsolicited e-mail requesting trades or services that do not
request money. The main point is that they are unsolicited. Note that sending e-mail
to people that did not explicitly provide you with their e-mail address for this
particular purpose is also an abuse. To be considered solicited the recipient of
the message must have provided their e-mail address directly to you explicitly for
this particular purpose. Further, signing up to one opt-in list does not infer that
the recipient has signed up for any other.
Unsolicited e-mail has been shown to cause performance bottlenecks by consuming a
great amount of bandwidth and is loathed by all but a few recipients. Since the
recipient is paying for their Internet access (everyone on the Internet is in some
form) it is unfair to attempt to pass on the cost of doing business to people not
involved in the operation. It is theft, plain and simple. Claims to the contrary
are only made by those stealing the resources.
Reputable Internet Service Providers recommend that clients not deal with any
company or individual that acts in this fashion.
Such e-mail is also commonly used as a vehicle for questionably legal scams. The
problem has reached such a critical level that the Federal Trade Commission in
the United States wants questionably legal material (get rich quick schemes,
financial promises, etc.) which may involve Americans sent to you by e-mail
to be forwarded to them at uce@ftc.gov. So far, thousands of the most dishonest
fraud promoters have been contacted directly by the FTC. They have also created a
Newsletter to help show some of tricks used by the usual cheats that send out
unsolicited commercial e-mail. Senders foolish enough to be resending existing
unsolicited commercial e-mail should remind themselves that they, too, may be
charged with fraud. Such charges can carry both civil and criminal penalties.
Canadian fraud laws are designed with much the same intent as the American ones.
Unsolicited commercial e-mail risks harming Merge's reputation as an Internet
citizen as well as computers and networks operated by Merge and third parties.
Systems exist on the internet to cause mail servers to refuse mail, even legitimate
mail, from domains and servers that have been guilty of allowing spam to be sent from
their network. In other words, one customer send UCE can conceivably be responsible
for an entire network's email being rejected - not by one other Internet provider,
but by every provider that subscribes to that anti-spam service.
One such service is the "Real-Time Blackhole List." Sendmail, the premier ISP
email server software has a configuration option that allows sendmail to check
*every* incoming mail again the RBL list. If a senders domain is on that list,
the mail is rejected. It is up to each ISP to assure that they are not on this list.
Policies such as the one you are reading are in place to facilitate this.
There are several efforts underway to have unsolicited e-mail qualified under
the same laws as "junk faxing" which is an excellent idea. Additionally several
very successful lawsuits have been brought by various companies across the Internet
against the senders for such abusive activity. Some receiving ISPs have been able
to recover many thousands of dollars from the individuals that sent the e-mail in
these suits.
Advertising in a less intrusive way that doesn't waste massive amounts of
bandwidth, such as creating a WWW site, is the far better alternative. E-mail
advertising is acceptable if the sender can prove that each individual recipient
authorized the sending of such e-mail beforehand (i.e., it is solicited or
"opt-in" mail). These activities normally require some business knowledge
and skill, however, and may exclude many existing senders of unsolicited
commerical e-mail.
Merge also does not permit "harvesting", the process of collecting e-mail
addresses from Internet servers (be it WWW, Usenet, etc.) without the express
permission of the particular user of the e-mail address.
Upon receipt of complaints of spamming, Merge will investigate the complaint
thoroughly. If it is clearly shown that mail meeting the above definition of UCE
has been routinely sent from one of our users accounts, that account will be closed.
Accounts closed in this manner are not subject to refunds of any sort.
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