Complete Noob - Mass Email: Illegal?

I see so many threads of people wanting help mass emailing to scraped emails from facebook/scrapebox/whatever?

Is is illegal and these guys just dont care/know? Or is there some legal twist to it? (im talking about in the US).

ALso i've read through the canspam act and it seems like as long as you followed the rules then the only thing that would make it illegal is the scraping part, is that true? Can i just buy/rent a huge list and be safe?

Is this a topic people don't want to talk about or something?

is illegal in US and in a lot of countries of the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)
"United States
Sanford Wallace and Cyber Promotions were the target of a string of lawsuits, many of which were settled out of court, up through the famous 1998 Earthlink settlement[citation needed]which put Cyber Promotions out of business. Attorney Laurence Canter was disbarred by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1997 for sending prodigious amounts of spam advertising his immigration law practice. In 2005, Jason Smathers, a former America Online employee, pled guilty to charges of violating the CAN-SPAM Act. In 2003, he sold a list of approximately 93 million AOL subscriber e-mail addresses to Sean Dunaway who, in turn, sold the list to spammers.[45][46]
In 2007, Robert Soloway lost a case in a federal court against the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of spamming. U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law.[47] ... .....

It depends on various aspects. It's quite a grey area. If you really want to stay safe, you need to keep in mind so many things that it's not even worth trying to keep it legal. Using tools like that makes it even harder to keep it legal, because you don't know where you exactly send them to and, obviously, they didn't give you permission by signing up to your website or something.

Worth a read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Spam_Act_of_2003


As for why nobody has replied yet: It's because it's really a grey area and hard to give a clear answer.

As for my advice: If people haven't volentary signed up for your emails (for example by registering to your website), it's probably illegal to spam them.

What I was told

"if the person never checked a box saying they want an email from you, its considered SPAM, and is technically illegal"

What about co-registrations?

Also what about buying/Renting lists? Infousa is a legit company and they're selling lists so others have to be legit to, right? But who? Where to buy / rent a list or get in on a co-reg?

I heard it's okay as long as you have an opt-out system

it is dangerous but you can get away with it if you really know how to cover your tracks.

I don't want to have to cover anything. I'm looking for a legit way to email a list that I don't already own.

Non CAN-SPAM compliant mail in the states is a felony. Most UCE is not compliant, including anything scraped from social sites. Since the penalties are so harsh for mailing, the vast majority of people that have any clue what they are doing will not talk to you about it.

We used to have a mailing section on the site but it became too much of a liability so it was deleted, along with all the posts it contained.

s0ap said:

Non CAN-SPAM compliant mail in the states is a felony. Most UCE is not compliant, including anything scraped from social sites. Since the penalties are so harsh for mailing, the vast majority of people that have any clue what they are doing will not talk to you about it.

We used to have a mailing section on the site but it became too much of a liability so it was deleted, along with all the posts it contained.

Click to expand...

interesting, thanks. So where can i go/who should i ask about LEGIT emailing strategies?