Question Four: What is the impact of the do not
email list?
To understand the answer to this question, you have to look at the
brief history of the
national “Do Not Call” list, implemented in October
2003 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The Do Not Call list was
implemented in response to consumer complaints about telemarketers
interrupting their key means of communication with annoying phone calls.
I call this practice “phone spam.” Telemarketing is in
fact just like spam, because it's unsolicited, untargeted, and rather
annoying. Consumers apparently agreed with that definition, which eventually
motivated them to generate tremendous political pressure to solve the
telemarketing problem.
The Do Not Call list was thus implemented, and call volume dropped
off significantly for those people who submitted their phone numbers
for the list, making it a tremendous success in the eyes of the public
and the politicians who passed the law. Riding on the momentum of the
success of this list, many people and lawmakers wanted to pass a similar
law to help stem the email spam problem. This is what gave rise to
the national “Do Not Email” list, even though the idea
of the Do Not Email list is based on faulty reasoning: that spammers
will adhere to the law. And, as we've seen following the implementation
of federal anti-spam legislation that went into effect Jan. 1, 2004, spammers
simply ignore federal law. They will not comply. Thus, the Do Not
Email list idea is dead on arrival. It will have absolutely no impact
on spammers, and will only serve to confuse legitimate email marketers
and create an ever-increasing burden on them to comply with a law that
has no bottom line benefit to the public.
Personally, based on these reasons and many others, I hope and predict
that the Do Not Email list idea will never be implemented. It is bad
policy and it won't stop spam. You will hopefully never need to comply
with a Do Not Email list; however, if the political process continues
to move forward despite the rather obvious evidence that spammers do
not comply with federal law, it is possible that the Do Not Email list
idea will be passed and you will be forced to comply with it. In such
a case, you will only have to download the list of email addresses
from the FTC and purge those emails from your existing database, making
sure that you never email those people any sort of unsolicited email
advertisement. You can still email people on those lists if they are
your existing customers and you have their permission—the conditions
under which you should be emailing people in the first place, lending
even more irrelevance to the Do Not Email list concept. This is because
email marketers who are mailing people with their permission don't
need to use the list, and spammers who are emailing people without
their permission will simply refuse to use the list.
So the bottom-line answer to the question of
what will be the impact of the Do Not Email list concept is a simple
one: it will be an extra hoop for legitimate, responsible email marketers.
Passage of the Do Not Email list will serve as good political posturing
for a few lawmakers who want to create the impression they are doing
something to fight spam, even though spammers are doing nothing to
comply with the law.
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