rants
I get it. Everybody needs to make money. If you’re in fundraising, advocacy, hyperlocal news, content newsletters, animal rescue, or almost anything, you’re in it to make money. Maybe not to get rich, but to get things done takes money and if you want to help your organization succeed, that means finding sponsors for potential advertising, sponsorship and other revenue opportunities. I’m not here to stop you from fundraising. But I have to warn you – cold leads are risky and damaging to deliverability. Send too much of that unsolicited “cold lead” mail and you’re brightly identifying yourself as a spammer, in particular to Gmail. One of the primary problems that potential clients approach me with is how to get themselves back to the inbox, after damaging their sending reputation by sending too much cold lead mail. Individually mailing 12 people directly whom you’ve looked up on a business leads
A friend recently shared a link to a spammer’s blog post bragging about how what they’re doing isn’t illegal. Weird flex, but OK. Going on your blog and defend your business model that way? “We’re not actually breaking the law! We promise! Cold lead emails are totally legal!” You do what you gotta do, I guess. But remember, farts are not illegal either, and they’re just about as broadly unloved as cold lead email campaigns.So, yeah, duh. Spam is not illegal. I’ve been pointing that out for years – here’s me mentioning back in 2010 that CAN-SPAM does not actually prohibit spam. It’s legal, flat out. But, as an argument to defend bad practices, “this is legal” is a red herring. What you should be asking is: how does CAN-SPAM regulate spam and what does it say about mail filtering and blocking? As I wrote about just a couple of