FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

By Mike Adams, president and CEO, Arial Software LLC

I built the very first permission email marketing application for the PC back in 1993. Since that time, I’ve waged a personal war against spammers and their spam, not only trying to encourage the passage of anti-spam legislation, but also by trying to educate spammers in an effort to convince them to change their ways.

Today, ten years later, the battle continues. Here’s what our company is doing today to combat spam:

Banning features that could be used by spammers
Our software remains unfriendly to spammers. It offers none of the features that spammers want, such as forging email headers or hijacking outbound SMTP servers. Our software offers no web harvesting features (spidering the web searching for email addresses to spam). Our software is also priced above what is considered affordable to spammers. All this means that spammers look elsewhere to buy spam software. Our Campaign Enterprise application is simply not very good at spamming (on purpose).

Supporting anti-spam legislation
Arial Software is a strong supporter of real anti-spam legislation, not the watered-down CAN-SPAM bill or other variations which still allow spamming under certain conditions. We believe ALL email addresses are private and nobody has the right to send unsolicited commercial email to any recipient without an existing relationship. Some spam bills want to give spammers the right to spam everybody, as long as they include an unsubscribe link. We think that’s ridiculous. No spam means no spam, period. Companies should be emailing people only when they’ve signed up for those emails.

Integrating anti-spam features in our software
Our existing software includes anti-spam features which help marketers avoid inadvertently sending email that may be perceived as spam. It also helps educate would-be spammers about the definition of spam, so they can “change their ways” and learn how to be a permission marketer instead of a spammer. Remember: tomorrow’s permission marketers are largely yesterday’s spammers. It’s usually all the same people; they’ve just been reformed.

Making it a violation of our license agreement to spam
If someone were to purchase our software and manage to use it for spamming (which is difficult, given that our software offers no spam-friendly features), they would be acting in direct violation of our license agreement. If we are made aware of such a violation, we have their software license immediately revoked.

Avoiding marketing to spammers
Arial Software doesn’t market software to spammers. Even when we advertise on search terms like “bulk email,” our ads and our ad landing pages explain to readers that we’re all about permission email marketing. We attempt to grab people who may have been thinking “bulk email” and, instead, show them there’s a better way to market.

Educating customers about permission marketing
We continue our efforts to educate customers about the power of permission marketing, including publishing customer-only articles, releasing free permission marketing audio programs, and encouraging high-integrity use of our software through our pre-sales and technical support phone conversations. We also tout our customers’ email successes with our software on our website in the form of testimonials.

In all, we’re battling hard against the spam problem. Spam harms everyone in this industry, including Arial Software. In my opinion, we’ll all be better off when spam is outlawed and spammers are either fully reformed or fined into bankruptcy.

If you have suggestions or ideas about how we can further fight the spam problem, please let us know. Our phone is 1-307-587-1338.

An evaluation version of Campaign Enterprise 8 is available at: http://www.arialsoftware.com/sw_download.asp

About the author

Arial Software president and CEO Mike Adams is the developer of the first permission email marketing desktop software application. He has over 15 years experience in the email marketing industry

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