Definition of SPAM

July 30th, 2008
By Simon

I found this interesting definition of SPAM in the spamhaus project

The word “Spam” as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email (”UBE”).

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
An email message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

1. Unsolicited Email is normal email (examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)
2. Bulk Email is normal email (examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

Technical Definition of Spam: An electronic message is “spam” IF

1. the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients;
2. AND
3. the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.

So after reading this definition I thought “is that something missing? Or it’s just a matter of permission and identity?”. In my country (Italy) a lot of bad translated email messages are delivered everyday. No-one reads anymore these emails, but they are still sent and written (and badly translated), what’s the market behind that spam email sending, that makes it sustainable? All those spam messages in a bottle are flooding our virtual beaches.

There are many retailers for drugs, pills, strange furniture, music CDs, software… all those people are sending new mass emails everyday without caring for the global time wasting action they are doing.

As polite email marketers we need to difference ourselves from these common spam emails, we have to give to our readers something different, our mass emails must be different. And what’s the only thing that a computer text cannot fake? It’s human personality.

In this scenario, the only behavior for our polite, opted-in bulk emails it to send mass emails only to subscribed users in our mailing list. What if we get caught by the spam-filters network before we get to our prospect’s inbox?

Here’s my personal list for what I understood about email marketing

1. We can check our email for spam rate before sending
2. We can build an opted-in user-base
3. We can closed-loops double opt-ins (closed loops on spamhaus)
4. We can write spam-free emails
5. We can ask our recipients if they got our email
6. We can ask our recipients to put us in their white list
7. We can write a meaningful subject our emails
8. We can automate email subject merging
   
9. We can write meaningful contents
10. We can write cool call to action texts
11. We can check your sender’s reputation

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