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So you run a business and wish to contact an individual or an organisation and make them aware of your services using the email address they have publicised in the YELLOW PAGES®, UBD or their website. Well, be very clear about your purpose before you click on the \"contact me\" email link because your business can be harmed big time if your purpose is defined as unwanted by the recipient.

Xtra has a policy that states that \"unwanted contact\" is defined by the recipient and not the sender:

Telecom Standard Terms of Service.
Section 6 - \"Your Responsibilities to Us\"
Use our services without annoying anyone and without

interfering with anyone else\'s use of our services. Never use them for advertising purposes unless requested.

Section 3 - \"What is spam?\"
Unsolicited commercial emails: email messages advertising a product or service sent without the receiver\'s consent.
Unsolicited bulk email: email messages that are sent in bulk to hundreds of recipients. They can be unsolicited commercial emails, or email for other purposes such as political lobbying or harassment. Unsolicited bulk email cannot only impact the operations system of servers, but can raise privacy concerns if it identifies other email addressees.

Emailing can now hinder your promotional efforts.
Take an awareness campaign for example: You probably would select your target market and search for \"email\" contact details for that person, or organisation on the web. You see that these email addresses are publicly available (as well as post, phone etc). So you choose to use email to make contact, and probably prefer to send the same message to as many contacts as you can find.

But don\'t group your contacts and click yet…
The definition of unsolicited is \"something not asked for\". Because the person or organisation you wish to contact has made their email address available, this implies that they wish to be contacted.

So, you think you are OK. Your correspondence is solicited; you are contacting the person or organisation because they have offered to be contacted.

No way.
If the recipient decides not to welcome your contact they can report you to a company like SpamCop (a US company that tends to act before qualifying their justification) or Xtra to get your ISP blocked - meaning your email facility will no longer work and, likely, neither will your web site. To add to this, you may get aggressive emails from your ISP calling you abusive and labelling you a Spammer.

How is spam defined?
There are many definitions of Spam, no one owns the definition and explanations existing on the web are full of ambiguity. As Xtra/Telecom runs the backbone of the delivery network their interpretation carries some weight.

From a common-sense marketing perspective, Spam is simply pot-luck, scatter-gun emailing, where addresses have been guessed, not knowing who the recipient is and why they would be interested in being approached, and often involves the forwarding on of unsolicited mail via cc facilities. These types of activities should be stamped out, they are Spam.

However, the bulk email scenario is fraught with problems: In terms of some definitions in use, any email received could now be termed unwanted by the recipient and the poor sender, trying to raise awareness of their services, is defenceless if reported as a Spammer.