I was wondering... If someone went to your website, looked up your email address on your web pages (or used the contact form) and sent you an offer for some service or product, would you consider that spamming?

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J de Silva
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Yes I definitely would consider that to be spamming. This would constitute unsolicited e-mail in my opinion.

Just as I consider a telemarketers call an invasion of my privacy. Just because my phone number is posted publicly in the phone book, doesn't mean I want unsolicited calls.

Spam is a plague on the internet society. I don't ever give out my email address unless it is over the phone or in person. I have carefully controlled my current email address and I actually get very, very little spam thankfully. But it restricts me and what I would consider the proper use of email.
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J, you never posted your opinion.

Interesting...

I didn't state my opinion because I wanted to see what others had to say about it first.

The reason why I asked the question in the first place is because I keep finding threads like this: a member posts a message in a popular forum stating that he got spammed by some webmaster. But the webmaster defends himself saying that he actually visited the potential client's site, found the "contact me email address" on one of the pages or used one of the "contact us forms" to send the person an email - so how is that considered spam?

Anyone can plainly see that I have both, i.e. the email address and the feedback form published on every web page off my sites.

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J de Silva
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Good idea I agree I really hate spam and pop ups they really are a plague. But as far as email goes I use hotmail, If i'm not to sure about the site and I'm afraid that I may find spam in my inbox the next time I download my mail I just give them my hotmail account. You should see my hotmail inbox last time I looked it was get about 200 messages a day.

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I hope others respond to this as well, because I am sure that other people may have differing viewpoints as well.

My experience comes from a small web page that I have for my engineering business. This is mostly set up to introduce the company and give a basic overview of our services (it is mostly a pretty bad site as well :-) ). It doesn't get a lot of traffic, but we included a info address. You should see the things that I get in this info email address. Not only are they things that don't apply at all to my business, some of them are for offers to increase the size of certain body parts. I don't even look at this address anymore. I just do a " cat /dev/null > info " every once in a while...

I once read somewhere how you could setup a spam-bot "honeypot". It used php to log the ip address of the spam-bot and somehow tagging it in a way that you could track future spam email to the individual spam bots. I'm gonna have to check out my bookmarks or do some Googling for this.

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OK, I forgot to mention this little detail: Assume for a second that you (the webmaster receiving the email) know for a fact that this person has actually visited the site and actually used the "Contact Us" form to email his potential client - is it STILL considered spamming?

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J de Silva
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Div - Any information that you can find on that honeypot would be very welcome. I am about to the point of removing the email link altogether

J - That is interesting. I do think that this is a little different as it is not just bulk email address mining and mass spamming. I would compare this more to a sales call and it can still be damn irritating, but it is not as ethically evil as spam.

This is what makes "selling" so dificult. How do people know that you have the greatest widget on earth if you can't tell them about it? But maybe I don't want a widget...

If you have a Contact form that only says that you should use it for feedback, comments etc then I would call it spam.

But contact forms without any 'rules' can just be used to inform you about some cheap Viagra..
you didn't say that you don't want people to contact you about that.

Something simple like a "Give your feedback" form may not be used to talk about viagra, that message will be spam.

IMO JdS, on your site the contact links only say contact me, so in this case spammers are allowed to 'contact you' about anything they want

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Hmmm, tricky. The problem is how to exactly define what SPAM is. I agree with this definition:

This definition (by no means the actual) makes no mention of the method used to send the mail, or how the email address was obtained. Then different countries have different laws on the matter: the US has quite weak laws with an opt-out system (any SPAM must have a unsubscribe option at the bottom - how honestly this is used is questionable, as by clicking on it confirms your email), whereas the EU have a stronger opt-in directive (where the recipient must give consent to the sender). comment.cio.com

Your case study is interesting, a spammer is using a feedback form to spam the webmaster. Clever, but is it acceptable? This senario reminds me of Hotmail and the bots which register new email addresses and use the service to spam other accounts. It's abusing the service. Similarily, in my opinion, the spammer is abusing the feedback form to send unwanted advertisements.

Here's a good article on this: www.techtv.com