Peronally, I still don't think this mail was NEARLY big enough a deal for the ****storm that followed it. The mail didn't even bother me.....and actually, I still don't get why people are so bent out of shape about it.
Ok the thread went insane in the 24 hours since I last checked it out. something like 12 new pages added to it, sorry to hear that so many people have had to deal with bulllshit stemming from my original post on scum about the spam. But I wanna reply to the above quote from Josh to explain a bit why I made the original post.
The e-mail message was an unsolicited message sent to the email addresses of users of the Rebelscum forums (and as in KBZ's case e-mail addresses not associated with the user account). While there was a mention of this being done in their privacy notice, this was never publicly mentioned. Why should it be mentioned? Because a good portion of the users at Rebelscum's forums signed up at the previous home of those forums, specifically CollectStarWars. By signing up there we were agreeing to those terms and any new terms should have been announced to the user base. Furthermore, under law (The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003) the message must include an opt-out from the e-mail list for any future messages, from
http://www.emailmarketingautoresponders.com/spamlaw.htm ....
Commercial e-mail must contain a clear identification that the message is an advertisement, must contain a conspicuous notice of opportunity to decline further e-mail and must display the physical postal address of the sender.
The message received from Phil and TRU did NOT include this opt-out message and that was in of itself one of my problems, though I admit I could have better stated that in my original thread on scum.
In the end the message was unsolicited and unwanted. It was just a repeat of information already on display on Rebelscum's news page, but apparently that wasn't enough. I expressed my concerns really as a way to make sure this did not become a re-occuring theme, where we start getting emails from other Rebelscum advertisers. No other reputable site that I know of, does these things (don't include SSG as doing it, because they aren't reputable to me), so I see no reason for it to have been done by scum. Well no reason that expresses a sense of community....