 pogPremium
join:2004-06-03
Kihei, HI
 ·Hawaiian Telcom
| reply to RARPSL
Re: This is not necessarily spam! said by RARPSL:This classification of the mail as being Solicited because the School sold the addresses to the company is a gray area. Did the school have PERMISSION from the student(s) and staff to include THEIR address? It certainly is a very gray area. Do the students actually have rights to their addresses? Maybe it's more like my domain at work... employees are issued addresses that are deleted when they leave... I (via the big cheese's authority) can put anything I choose into those boxes with or without the consent of the employee. If we sell our company email list to some 3rd party, that's "management's" business... not the employees'.
If an authorized employee/rep of the school did indeed sell the list of student emails directly to this company then it's very poor ethics for the school to turn around and render that list useless by blocking messages. I would think by buying a list it's implied that it's going to be usable. However, we have no idea what the terms of such a sale were... single use? Maybe the spammer actually bought the list from a middleman/harvester? Too many unanswered questions, I think.
If not, then any mail sent to someone who did not give permission is UNsolicited. This is the same principle as giving your address to a company to communicate with you but withholding permission (by checking or unchecking a check box on their Web Form) for advertising or passing on to unrelated 3rd parties. The school has the address for SCHOOL RELATED purposes and any other use or distribution requires separate permission.
I would agree with you 100% IF the student addresses belonged to the students themselves and were not on the school's domain. Perhaps I read the article wrong, though... everything I've said up to now was based on the notion that these addresses were @school.edu and were hosted by the school's servers.
It's a whole other game if Sally Student gave the school her Gmail account for communication and the school then gave that account to a spammer. |
