A client of mine is talking about running an email marketing campaign for his business. To do this, he is talking to a company who sell email addresses. He would purchase thousands of email addresses from them, then create and send an email to these email addresses to advertise his business.

 

What is the law regarding this sort of thing? Is it illegal within the UK to send unsolicited emails like this?

 

Thanks.

regardless of the law, this is a dangerous thing to do in my opinion.

 

 

i used mailchimp to send over 2000 emails for a client. i used a list that had been compiled by the client. they assured me, and i believe them, that the emails had been volunteered to them.

 

we still got 6 spam complaints. this is enough for mailchimp to close my account with them, luckily they haven't.

 

there are other more anonymous ways of doing it i imagine but it's really not good netiquette. it will likely annoy a good chunk of the people who receive the mails. nowadays mailing software requires that emails are submitted voluntarily and then re-confirmed by email to make sure they are not going to report spam.

 

email is sacred.

Yeah I agree with you, I am not keen on this but he is desperate to try and drum up some business. I certainly won't be allowing him to send the emails through the server we use if he does go for it. He wants my help to construct the email. I'd rather not get involved and if it is illegal it makes it easy for me to refuse to get involved.

 

I found the following web page:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/topic_specific_guides/online/spam_emails.aspx

What does the law say?

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 cover the sending of email marketing. This legislation says that organisations must only send marketing emails to individuals if you have agreed to receive them, except where there is a clearly defined customer relationship.

Many spam emails come from outside the UK. The ICO can only investigate complaints about marketing emails from identifiable UK senders.

It would help if your client has some form of knowledge that could be leveraged into getting people to sign up to his own list - that tends to be the best way. What line of business is your client in?

hi redranger, as you mentioned that a friend of yours would be purchasing emails and marketing through them - don't you think it would not be troublesome for him to handle so many accounts at a single point of time? Moreover it would be considered as spamming that is actually not a good practice. if he wants to market his business via emails then the best way would be to buy an email marketing software and use that for marketing, the advantage would be that he can ask people to subscribe and once they subscribe then you emails won't reach spam folder. Good Luck!