wrote in message
...
David Hearn wrote:
the business that has already taken place between the two parties
and a
specific opt-in is not required, but only if those businesses were
given
an
opt-out option when their details were first collected and chose not
to
opt
out.

More to the point how do you differentiate 'business' and 'individual'
E-Mail addresses? It suggests a total misunderstanding of E-Mail and
the internet if TPTB think there is an actual difference.

Well, I have a work email address and a private email address. When I
leave
this company, I lose my work email address but keep the private email
address. Quite a clear differentiation between them in that respect -

Er, yes, but no possible way to differentiate by looking at the
address. How are senders of unsolicited mail supposed to find out
whether an address is a 'business' address or an 'individual' address?
Not to mention that I'm not convinced that a your work E-mail address
is necessarily a business E-Mail address, if it's something like
' then it's still an individual being
addressed, apparently. Similarly I might perfectly well decide that
my personal/individual address is going to be , is
that an individual address or a business addres?


That is the whole problem and shows how difficult it is to comply with this
legislation and how open to abuse it is. I would be inclined to say
is private, most
likely business, but could be anything. I think the draft
legislation had something to the effect of business addresses can be
emailed, but not if that email address was personally identifiable but I
think that has been dropped in the final legislation. That would basically
mean the only usable email addresses would be the sales@... and info@...
type addresses which are no use at all to market to.

In most instances, if the company has a postal address for the customer
which mentions a company name, they can be considered legitmate business
customers no matter what the email address - a great number of my company's
customers use aol, freeserve, hotmail etc as their business emails eg
. If the company peronsalises the emails
they send and includes that company name in the email (something like, Hi
Fred, As one of our valued customers we thought Bloggs Industries would love
to hear about...) then they would appear to be trying to ensure that they
only reach legitimate business customers.

Phil