Answer
What constitutes an ethical post can be somewhat subjective, however generally speaking the guidelines regarding what does and what does not constitute spam can be used as a guideline. The recipient of the message will also have ideas as to what does and what doesn’t consitute spam, and these may be quite different from your own.
To this end it is not advisable to purchase in a pre formed mailing list, particularly those advertised in commom spam messages. Often these lists are populated, not with people who have given their consent to be on the list, but with email addresses harvested from the Internet. Using a list of this type can cause a high proportion of the recipients to report you as a spammer and thus damage your good reputation.
As a general rule, if the message content is of interest to the recipient then it is much less likely to be regarded as spam. The only difficulty then is legitimately interesting people in your mailing lists and obtaining information on their interests when they are added to your list.
While much more difficult, opt-in lists, where you build a list of addresses who have specifically requested information from you is much more advantageous. These could come from your existing customer database as well as visitors to your website. GMS Communication Server provides several ways to facilitate list joins to make it was easy as possible for people to join your mailing lists. It also provides the facility to store information about these list members alongside their member record so postings can be refined using the MML scripting language to ensure that those members only see material of relevance to them.
By default, and a sa safegaurd against members being maliciusly joined to any of your lists, GMS Communication Server operates a double opt-in policy. That is, not only must people specifically request to join your list, but once they have done so a confirmation message is automatically sent to them. Only when they respond to this confirmation message do they actually become active list members.
Several states in the US require by law that unsubscribe information is included with each email sent out to the list. Using GMS Communication Server with MML, administrators can include this information at the bottom of each email sent out, specifically customised for the user receiving the email.
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Keywords:ethical posting of email distribution lists double opt-in