Arrested Customer Communications

It's getting harder and harder for businesses to communicate with their customers via e-mail. If the spammers themselves don't stop them, the measures users take to keep the spam under control very likely will. And, as one reader recently opined, when those measures include white-list vendor Spam Arrest, businesses also have to worry about their legal liability for contacting their own customers. "A significant

It's getting harder and harder for businesses to communicate with their customers via e-mail. If the spammers themselves don't stop them, the measures users take to keep the spam under control very likely will. And, as one reader recently opined, when those measures include white-list vendor Spam Arrest, businesses also have to worry about their legal liability for contacting their own customers.

"A significant portion of both our orders and tech support questions are received through our e-store and by e-mail," wrote the reader, who is the president of a small software development company. "Our auto-responders and our tech support replies are not delivered to a few of our customers because they have been intercepted by Spam Arrest. Customers do not think to put our domain name on their "friends" list. Let me say that we never sell or rent our e-mail list, nor do we send out anything that even feels like spam. We send out upgrade notices. Once in two years we might send out a general commercial e-mail on our products, including an introduction of a new product."

The problem the reader encountered with Spam Arrest is one we've noted before: the intimidating terms it requires senders to accept in order to deliver the message to its intended Spam Arrest-using recipient. The terms of the Spam Arrest sender agreement remain virtually identical to those we saw over a year ago, still mandating a penalty of $2,000 for current and future messages that Spam Arrest deems unsolicited commercial e-mail. That's annoying enough if you're sending a message to a friend, but for a small businessperson like the reader it presents what he considers an unacceptable risk.

After all, the e-mail he wants to send his customers is commercial in nature, and it could appear to Spam Arrest to be unsolicited. "We have hundreds of thousands of customers," the reader wrote. "It is not practical to try and get all of them to give us specific authorization each times we want to send them upgrade notices. Further, if we were to start collecting the customer pre-approvals that Spam Arrest insists on, it could take more than ten years before we would be willing to drop customers who have not agreed to accept e-mail from us."