Similarly, attaching promotional materials to my receipts and other transactional mail is an abuse of the relationship.
Email is a means of personal communication. I trust that when I give out my email, it will only be used for the promised purposes - such as giving me order receipts, or establishing an account. Giving out this email for one purpose is not implicit permission to use it for another purpose.
If you gave them your e-mail address obviously for another purpose (for example, as an account ID, or to receive a confirmation message when your order is dispatched or your card is charged) and they then use it for general marketing then that's so clearly an abuse of trust that IMHO they deserve and should expect to be treated as a spammer.
As far as what the law says, here in Europe, you might get away with sending marketing to such addresses under PECR if you still collected the address at the time of a sale or in connection with a genuine sales enquiry. However, it's a fine line, and one mis-step in any of several conditions will put you the wrong side of the law. Also, the preceding comments relate to the specific EU anti-spamming regulations, but there are more general laws regarding harassment etc. in most jurisdictions as well.
There's a pretty simple test for your situation, really: if you want to send people marketing messages but aren't willing to ask their permission explicitly because you think they'll say no, your messages are probably spam and you're probably a spammer.
This isn't a conversation about "SPAM", it's a conversation about companies managing customer contact responsibly, and customers responding responsibly to the contact, which in some cases means not overreacting.
> There's a pretty simple test for your situation, really: if you want to send people marketing messages but aren't willing to ask their permission explicitly because you think they'll say no, your messages are probably spam and you're probably a spammer.
But that's begging the question, since you already put the reasoning in place. What if it's as simple as testing shows that customers will overwhelmingly opt-out initially, but then there's a steady influx of evidence that customers would benefit from some level of contact (i.e. support requests that say as much, forum posts, etc), such as noting when a previously charged for service is now free, when service outages are scheduled to happen, etc.
In the end, is it really so hard to see how a company acts in it's correspondence before vilifying it?
Sure it is, but some things are the wrong side of that line for most users. That's why there are laws against them.
Does that mean everyone needs to deal with no email communication by default just because a few people feel it's too hard to find a (legally required) opt-out link in the first email they receive?
As I said, if you're worried enough that you aren't willing to ask people to opt in instead, you're probably a spammer.
"Dealing with no email communication by default" is not what we're talking about. No-one here is saying you shouldn't send e-mails for the purpose that someone actually gave you their address, for example.
If you actually meant "dealing with no marketing email communication by default" then I'm pretty sure most people would "deal with" that just fine. When was the last time you heard someone complain that they didn't get spammed enough today, or their browsing experience was suffering from not having enough ads cluttering the pages they wanted to read?
This isn't a conversation about "SPAM"
I'm pretty sure it is. It's right there in the quote from the article in the first post of this thread, and in numerous further posts between there and here.
But that's begging the question
No, it wasn't. If I'd written "If you want to send people marketing messages that they don't want, you're a spammer", that would indeed have been a tautology. But I left you another option, finding out whether they want them or not by asking first.
In the end, is it really so hard to see how a company acts in it's correspondence before vilifying it?
No, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a company that specialises in sending bulk e-mail discussing the possibility of actively circumventing measures intended to stop users having to read marketing mails they don't want. Again, it's right there in the quotation at the top of this thread.
(Your other examples weren't unreasonable, but they also clearly weren't marketing mail assuming they related to people actually using the service you were sending the information about.)
Make each bit opt-in. Problem solved. These emails really should be off by default.
Previous time I made a similar point on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5705769