Discussion: Spam emails

Well done, organisers - got my first bit of orienteering-specific spam email from you. You can tell it's spam because the first line says "Please don't mark this email as spam."

*sigh*

I'm hopefully going to Portugal in 2016 for MTBO. Should I take my own Spam?

I got four copies of that email. The addresses are clearly scraped from our club website, because they are things like "president" at baoc.org.

Was wondering if they'd scraped it from AP, but yeah - state association websites would be more likely.

Hell, even googling "orienteering contact us" returns an impressive array of pages loaded with emails.

I haven't got it so they can't have found our state association email list yet (either that or, you know, Hotmail), although I did get one last week from someone who wanted to tell me how we can increase the number of hits on the website.

I got it twice - once through Orienteering Ontario and once through a public club email ID. I didn't get it through the email ID I've listed on AP.

Why is it a problem for orienteers to receive an orienteering-related email?

Because I didn't ask for it, or sign up to any list where I would expect to get it.

Just because it's targeted spam doesn't mean it's not spam.

Well, since we know who the "spammer" is (he made no attempt to conceal his identity), why don't we just ask how he got our e-mails?

Spam him back.

Prior to this thread, I was unaware of the Portugal o meeting. Viral marketing at its finest.

I too got the email and was glad to get it. I never even considered it as spam until I saw this posting. I orienteer and they have a major international event and were letting me know about it--sounds reasonable enough.

Right, I don't consider it spam. Just out of curiosity, I looked up a definition; I suspect there are lots of definitions but the first one I found was "irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients". It certainly isn't irrelevant to send information about a big orienteering event to people interested in orienteering.

I would feel differently if such a message went out to, say, everyone who had an interest in some type of sport, where only a tiny percentage of recipients are orienteers.

According to Canada's anti-spam legislation, it isn't spam if it is sent to someone's published email ID and the message relates to their work. If someone scraped email IDs from Attackpoint, that would definitely be spam in Canada. It probably wasn't spam (in the legal sense) to contact me at info @ orienteeringontario.ca - but I sure hope it doesn't become a trend!

It's spam in my book because it's a mass mailing we didn't sign up for. It's an unsolicited email advertisement, i.e. spam.

Agree with carlch and rlshadow. I've been seeing announcements of the winter Portugal O meeting every year for several years. A one or twice yearly announcement of international event is certainly not too intrusive when targeted to known active orienteers. Now if he were to send me the same notice repeatedly, or announce every single local event (as a certain nameless club likes to do with their ski-O events), it might get a bit annoying.

Bash, if it does become a trend, you can make it illegal spam by adding to the email address a statement that you don't wish to receive promotional or marketing messages. However, according to the government's FAQs, there is also an exemption for persons sending messages to persons at another organization, where the messages concern the activities of that other organization and the organizations have a relationship.
I saw that Rogers recently paid $200,000 to settle various alleged violations such as an unsubscribe mechanism that didn't function properly.

It's spam in my book because it's a mass mailing we didn't sign up for. It's an unsolicited email advertisement, i.e. spam.

This. Key word being 'unsolicited'.

If you want to advertise your carnival internationally, pay the piddly little fee and advertise in the national magazines or ask the national associations to put it on their websites. They'll probably also share your link on FB too, if you ask them. It's not difficult.

A one or twice yearly announcement of international event is certainly not too intrusive when targeted to known active orienteers.

How about when every organiser of a large scale orienteering event - and what is large scale, national? international? - starts sending once or twice yearly emails, how many do you end up with and do you then get sick of them?

I look forward to the day when I get so much spam about major orienteering events that I find it annoying.

In the mean time, I don't mind getting "spam" from Oringen, SOW, the Portugal O' meeting or that Portugal mapper guy that is trying to drum up business.

Maybe I just don't get enough "Spam"--only 40 today but they are very simple to delete without every opening.

I've been to Portugal O Meeting twice and enjoyed it very much. Nice opportunity to string together a few multi-day events. Weather can be a bit spotty. I didn't mind the mass email, in my case sent to board members listed on our club's website. Other board members were more tempted by the meet than irritated by 1-2 emails.

Gees if I received 40 emails on a daily basis that I just went and deleted without reading I'd be a bit peeved. I think the 'junk' option in my email may be saving me from that though.

As an aside, I enjoyed the Portugal O Meeting that I attended, as as other O events in Portugal. At least the product seems good, for what it's worth.