Netiquette and Bulk Email

Responsible Use of Bulk Email is Virtually Endless

With little fanfare, electronic mail has become the most popular application on the Internet. As a versatile vehicle for personal and business communications, e-mail is booming, with more users, many more messages and vastly longer messages in the offing.

According to Eric Arnum, editor of the newsletter EMMS, 45 million people, a third of the U.S. workforce, can now access e-mail from the office or from home. In addition to the sustained rise in message traffic, Arnum predicts that message size will also grow, perhaps massively. The 17 billion messages sent in 1994 will balloon to 50 billion in 1998, with a 50 percent boost in users. Much of this mail will be piggybacked with multimedia attachments, which could pump up the average message size from 2.5KB for today's text missive to a hefty 5MB tomorrow.

Like any emerging form of communication, electronic mail is subject to abuse. An untold percentage of e-mail messages are unexpected and unwanted, through sins of omission or commission. Amid Arnum's growth estimates, the impact of unsolicited e-mail, through spiraling costs for Net access and mail processing time, can become only more problematic for sender, recipient and Internet service provider (ISP).

Spamming

Unsolicited bulk e-mail, that is, "spamming" (the term coined to describe mass cross-posting to Usenet newsgroups), typically is sent on an indiscriminate basis by a dedicated list server to large numbers of electronic mailboxes, often without identifying the source and with no clear mechanism to respond directly to the sender. Like an unsolicited fax, such broadcast e-mail places the burden on the recipient and, here, the ISP as well. Although the culture of the Internet is changing, unsolicited mass e-mail remains an affront to netiquette, the special groundrules for interactions in this new medium. Simple courtesy aside, indiscriminate mass e-mailing is poor business practice; it's unlikely to be effective and it can be counterproductive, alienating recipients and the Internet community at large.

Serving Recipient and Sender

At Access Abroad, we believe that electronic mail, specifically, e-mail as a two-way business tool and an interactive extension of the World Wide Web, has the potential to be of enormous benefit to sender and recipient alike, saving time and money while strengthening the bond between them.

It's clear, however, that electronic mail that does not serve the recipient will not serve the sender.

Our intervention is an enabling tool for personalized, high-volume mailing over the Internet. It complements existing software and empowers individuals, companies and organizations to reach large numbers of contacts efficiently and inexpensively. Our intervention is designed primarily for stakeholders where- in the sender and recipient have:

We encourage our clients to employ other means of product presentation and consumer education in  addition to bulk email despatch eg newspaper advertisement; networking with ethnic organisations; alumni societies and business groups as well as participation in trade fairs.

Code of Business Practice

NetMailing must reflect common sense and courtesy, and at all times be in keeping with responsible business practice. To advance this common understanding, we offer the following code of business practice:

Access Abroad is working aggressively with the industry to educate users on electronic mail practices and procedures, and on innovative ways to make e-mail part of the fabric of electronic business.