I hate email spam. Email spam is sending unsolicited bulk emails to people. I.e. the people who receive the emails didn't ask for them, and didn't agree to receive them. But what if a company tricks you by placing an agreement to receive the emails in a place where you are unlikely to see it when you click on a link for something else. Cheating? It is in my book. In that circumstance, you didn't knowingly optin or agree to receive the emails, therefore, the emails are unsolicited - spam.
iEntry is a publishing company who produce a myriad of newsletters that are delivered by email. The purpose of the newsletters is to sell advertising in them. But iEntry have a problem. They can't sell advertising for very much money if the newsletters don't have reasonably large circulations. The larger the circulation, the more money they can get for the advertisements.
Many websites offer newsletters. There is usually an opt in system on the site so that people can choose to receive them, and iEntry is no different in that respect. But those systems don't always produce the number of optins that would increase the circulation enough to make good money from the advertisements, and it must be very tempting to find other ways of acquiring optins, even if it means hiding automatic optins from people. After all, the advertisers, who would be paying more money for the ads, are unlikely to realise that most of the 'optins' didn't know that they were opting in to anything, and that they didn't agree to receive anything, and that they don't want to receive anything. The advertisers would end up paying higher prices to deliver their ads to people who they think chose to receive them - but they didn't. Not only did they not choose to receive them, but they specifically don't want to be spammed by them. But that's exactly what iEntry does.
How do they do it? Many website owners want their websites to be listed in the various online directories, so they submit them to the directories. iEntry owns a directory called Jayde. So a website owner goes to the Jade site and submits his site. In submitting the site, he confirms that he has read Jayde's terms and conditions. Of course he doesn't read them, because it's just a directory and the T&Cs are bound to be perfectly normal. Or if he does decide to read them, he sees the length of the page, and decides not to bother. After all, it's only a directory, just like all the other directories. That's the way that most people would do it, and that's exactly what iEntry rely on to pick up newsletter optins that aren't willing optins at all. The T&C includes a statement that submitting a site to the directory automatically opts the person in to receive a newsletter.
Yes, the statement is there to be seen, but who reads lengthy T&Cs when submitting a site to a perfectly ordinary directory? To my way of thinking, the statement is intentionally hidden from people for the purpose of getting newsletter optins without people realising it - hence, unsolicited emails.
Another way that iEntry gets unknowing optins is with their WebProWorld forum. When people register in the forum, without realising it, they automatically optin to receive a newsletter - hence, unsolicited emails - spam. This is how it works...
The forum is perfectly normal in that, when a person registers, a confirmation email is sent. The email contains a link to activate the new account. Such confirmation emails are normal for many kinds of sites, and people are used to them, so they click the link without reading the rest. What they don't realise is that buried at the bottom of the email is a statement that clicking the link automatically opts in to receive a newsletter. They didn't knowingly opt in to receive the newsletter - hence, unsolicited emails - spam.
The spamming was discussed in a thread in WebProWorld's forum. During the discussion more and more people posted to say that they were receiving the spam as well. Nobody had realised that the forum's confirmation email contained the newsletter statement, because it was hidden at the bottom, and out of sight without scrolling all the way down to see it. As a result of that discussion, WebProWorld moved the statement up a little, but it is still too far down, especially when everyone knows what the email is, and just clicks the link to complete the registration.
There was another discussion in this site's forum, called "WebProWorld are spammers".
I am sure that iEntry have more ways of getting unknowing optins that I don't know about. The upshot of it is that many, probably most, people receive their newsletters without ever knowingly opting in. They didn't choose to receive them, they were unsolicited, and that makes the newsletters spam. Since many or most of the emails are spam and unwanted, the advertisers must be paying way over the odds, wrongly believing that people who receive the newsletters chose to receive them.
Unsubscribe?
So what about opting out of the newsletters? It can be done. There's an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of each one, and it works. But sometime down the line, it's a near certainty that the spam newsletters will start coming again - not always because iEntry adds you to the list again, although they do do that, but because the tricks are still out there waiting to catch the unwary - all of us! I have unsubscribed to every newsletter several times, but they always start up again. That's because the tricks were well hidden, and like everyone else, I didn't know they even existed.
http://www.webworkshop.net/webproworld-are-spammers.html
