Question: As a business owner, am I allowed to visit Web sites of my prospects, one at a time, find their email addresses, and then email them each a relevant email message (even though they never gave me express permission to contact them)?

If so, then am I allowed to email my message to two or more of these prospects at the same time (as long as it's relevant to both of them)?

If so, then where is the line between doing what I've described and "email harvesting" or "scraping" addresses?

Answer: While we aren't lawyers, nor do we play them on TV, we can explain how we understand "email harvesting" and the legal aspects under CAN-SPAM:

First, we don't condone email harvesting, which is the act of collecting public email addresses from Web sites or Web services.

The word is usually understood to mean automated collecting, using a robot that crawls Web pages, pulling off email addresses and adding them to a mailing list or database for email marketing. Manual collection is still subject to the same rules.

However, some Web sites have also published notices prohibiting transferring those addresses, whether automatically or manually, into systems that send email. Any collection of these addresses is in violation of CAN-SPAM.

If you personally collect public email addresses from Web sites that don't prohibit their reuse for sending unsolicited email, we don't believe it would violate the law. It doesn't matter whether you create a mailing list and send out a bulk email or write individual messages.

That said, you should be more concerned with how relevant your recipients really will consider your email marketing messages. The less relevant the message, the more likely recipients will file spam complaints with their ISPs, and that could affect your ability to send more email.

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