SMS.ac spamming new members

by David Evans on February 22, 2005 in Marketing, Mobile

I recently received an invitation from a friend to join the SMS.ac mobile phone text messaging service. My friend said he never knowingly invited me, and digging around I see that blogger Joi Ito is being potentially sued for calling the SMS “address book synchronization” feature spam after they contacted all the people in his hotmail address-book.

If you are going to introduce a viral component to your marketing initiatives, take the time to test it out and get feedback from on lots of people (novice and expert internet users alike) before rolling it out to customers. I receive roughly 15 emails per week from 4 or 5 dating sites, and that’s just too much email. Giving people a compelling reason to visit a service is one thing, badgering with free trials and fake looking models week after week is another. It makes you look desperate and unprofessional. At some point, you lost me as a potential paying customer. Why not ask me why I keep deleting your emails instead of continuing to send them? Email is cheap and easy, but a successful marketing campaign usually isn’t.

Sharing:

1 M. Mosiek March 1, 2005 at 10:42 am: I believe that sms is spamming, even under the quite narrow definition in the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. My situation is different than those of the other posters, I suspect, in that I was foolish enough to give sms my username/password, but I didn’t agree to the terms and conditions. Here is my story:

I naively followed the link I had gotten in one of their emails, and gave the site my email address and password. Only when I was prompted to create a username/password for the sms site did I get wise. So I bailed out before agreeing to the Terms and Conditions.

However, that didn’t stop them from harvesting my address book. But, by not agreeing to the T&C, I was effectively denying them consent to raid my address book. (This is actually a federal crime much worse than CAN-SPAM violations, I think. Moreover, it is expressly prohibited under the Hotmail T&C.)

So they send emails out to some people in the address book. I believe that Sec 5(b) of CAN-SPAM expressly prohibits the non-consensual harvesting of email addresses from a “protected computer” (i.e., the hotmail server).

Anyway, I’d love to get my account deleted. But guess what? I need to agree to their T&C before their page will let me enter the site! I’m thinking of writing to the corporate department and asking to be removed. Or maybe I should just file a complaint with the ftc, or something. I am convinced that this company has broken several laws (at least with respect to my own situation).

Any thoughts?
2 J March 11, 2005 at 2:38 pm: I keep getting spammed by this stuff to. But I have a plan. Let’s fight fire with fire, if we all work together it will work fantastically. Let’s use their own software against them.

Step 1: Create a new hotmail account

Step 2: Add the following e-mail addresses, as found on the SMS.ac corporate website, to the address book of your new account
sponsorships@corp.sms.ac
hr@corp.sms.ac
bizdev@corp.sms.ac
partnerinfo@corp.sms.ac
prcomm@corp.sms.ac
customercare@corp.sms.ac

Step 3: Sign up for SMS.ac using you’re newly created account

Now they will be spamming themselves. The more people we get to do this the better. Sure they will eventually block all such e-mails in their system, but that’s the future, let’s punish them today.