I have a list of 20,000+ email contacts all of who have registered with my organisation. I would like to email them all with an invitation to visit a specifc website for customer feedback. This is a legitimate organisation and website (UK based).
I have 2 questions:
a) would this be spamming? - not something we would want to be involved in.
b) would our email address be picked up by or added to spam software databases such as McAfee, Norton, etc?
Additional Details from asker:
All those on our database have voluntarily provided email addresses for us to contact them with as regards their account with us.
The purpose of the mail out would be to gain feedback about the service we provide, and to gain consent for further email contact.
We have not, and do not intend to, harvest mail addresses from newsgroups, websites etc.
I am currently looking at the legality and viability of this, hence the question.
Answer:
Its not spam if your customers agree to have additional messages sent to them from your company.
Technically, its spamming. BUT, if any of your customers have all agreed that they want to be informed of anything new or related, then its fair game that you send them an email. If people respond back to you indicating they want to be removed from your list, you are obligated to adhere to their request. So you need to manage your list if you haven't already.
Since you have 20,000+ addresses, it is possible that one of your clients is using some sort of anti spam solution. and if they are Corporate clients then you can bet for sure they are using something. its possible some of these clients may send 'data' back to their vendor indicating spam was detected and where it came from. This all depends on the nature of your message and who you are sending it to... if its a bunch of individual consumers, then you might have nothing to worry about. So the answer to your question really depends on who and what you are sending, if it will be picked up or added to spam software databases.
By the sounds of what you are doing, this doesn't sound like it would cause you any harm.
You should investigate a method (something like ReturnPath?) of sending out the email in a step by step approach, and not just dump 20,000 email addresses into one email address and let your email server send it out. It will take up some of the resources to do that. NOt sure if you've considered that but its something to keep in mind.
Technically, its spamming. BUT, if any of your customers have all agreed that they want to be informed of anything new or related, then its fair game that you send them an email. If people respond back to you indicating they want to be removed from your list, you are obligated to adhere to their request. So you need to manage your list if you haven't already.
Since you have 20,000+ addresses, it is possible that one of your clients is using some sort of anti spam solution. and if they are Corporate clients then you can bet for sure they are using something. its possible some of these clients may send 'data' back to their vendor indicating spam was detected and where it came from. This all depends on the nature of your message and who you are sending it to... if its a bunch of individual consumers, then you might have nothing to worry about. So the answer to your question really depends on who and what you are sending, if it will be picked up or added to spam software databases.
By the sounds of what you are doing, this doesn't sound like it would cause you any harm.
You should investigate a method (something like ReturnPath?) of sending out the email in a step by step approach, and not just dump 20,000 email addresses into one email address and let your email server send it out. It will take up some of the resources to do that. NOt sure if you've considered that but its something to keep in mind.
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