Bulk Email

There are two kinds of bulk or mass emails – the legitimate bulk email, and the unsolicited bulk or commercial email. The legitmate bulk email refers to email messages that are sent to a large list of recipients who either directly or passively agreed to receive communications from the sender or senders. For example, someone who visits a website and accepts an offer to sign up for future special offers or information. The offer may also have originated through a message posted by a member of a discussion group.

Legitimate bulk email will contain a link, clearly labeled, for recipients to unsubscribe to the list service or a way to customize their subscriber preferences. An online retailer may offer several newsletters or email categories for their customers based on the different groups of merchandise they offer. For example, an outdoor outfitter may offer emails or newsletters geared to the type of outdoor activity and the corresponding merchandise specials. Therefore a person who specializes in rock climbing won’t receive newsletters that offer extreme-mountain biking equipment or other merchandise that is unrelated to the subscriber’s interests.

Unsolicited bulk email or spam email is an evolution of ‘bulk mail’ when unsolicited advertising pieces were sent to homes via the United States Postal Service. Bulk or junk mail is now synonymous with email spam, where identical messages are sent to numerous recipients by email. Unwanted or spam/bulk messaging originated with the Monty Python sketch, named for Spam luncheon meat which is ubiquitous and unavoidable.

Addresses for bulk email are collected from various sources. Chat rooms and newsgroups along with a variety of viruses that harvest address books of unsuspecting users are some of the most common sources. These addresses are then sold in bulk email lists. There are many email newsletter companies that prohibit uploading or using these lists due to the overwhelming spam reports that can shut down mail servers and interrupt service for legitimate account holders. The other downside to these lists is that a large percentage of email addresses are or quickly become invalid. According to the Message Anti-Abuse Working Group, the amount of spam email sent in the first half of 2010 was between 88–92% of all messages.