What part of ‘no spam’ don’t you understand?

Honest mistakes are one thing. But claims of special privilege mixed with willful disregard of rules is another. My first IT job, some years ago, was with a company where the execs started off by making an honest mistake, but unfortunately descended to the latter. By the time I left, they still hadn’t learned their lesson.

The company was a very small marketing firm that held events to introduce vendors to potential customers. I was the IT jack-of-all-trades, fresh out of school and thrilled to be working in the industry. I soon found out my education hadn’t prepared me for how the company dealt — or, rather, didn’t deal — with a problem that cropped up.

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For any particular conference, the marketing department would do searches for firms and organizations that might be interested in the conference topic, then send them a marketing email about it. The marketers also added email addresses to the marketing list garnered from colleagues and other sources.

Spam masked as marketing

This had been going on for some months when I received a phone call from our ISP’s abuse department, explaining about the spam our company was sending out and how our contract did not permit it.

I was surprised and said I’d look into it and call back. I asked around the office, but nobody claimed to be aware of the ISP rules or even known what was in the contract. I dug up a copy of the contract; sure enough, our company was violating the terms.

I called the ISP’s representative back. He understood it was an honest mistake and, since none of us had been aware of the rules, even told me they would let us continue spamming for a few more weeks while we implemented an opt-in system.

It goes all the way to the top

I reviewed all of this with the company president, “Chip,” and the email marketing person, “Dale.” Nothing doing, they both told me. An opt-in system would be too expensive and would put the company out of business. Besides, they said, we carefully screen all names and honor all removal requests, so we’re not really doing anything wrong. We’re not “real” spammers, like those Viagra people. We’re a legitimate business.

For the next several months, I continued fielding phone calls from the ISP’s abuse department, sometimes taking the calls myself, other times forwarding them to either Chip or Dale when I felt particularly uneasy about the ethical implications of our actions. I also periodically met with Dale to discuss the problem, explaining that what we weren’t honoring our contract and if we didn’t knock it off, we’d face consequences. He never took me seriously.

Finally, the ISP called and told me that we were on our final warning: If the ISP received even one more spam complaint about us, it was going to disconnect our service. I asked the provider to send the warning in a written form so that I could use it to persuade Chip and Dale to change their ways. Then, I met with both Chip and Dale, explaining that we must stop spamming. They waved my concerns away, as usual.

A few days later, during an all-hands meeting, Chip and Dale blithely discussed the start of the next email blast the following morning. I was too stunned to speak — and what I was thinking could not be said out loud.

That night, I stayed three hours late and downloaded all of our content from the ISP’s servers in anticipation of losing access, then waited for the ax to fall. About a week later, it did, when my phone suddenly started ringing off the hook with staff reporting that their email had stopped working.

I contacted the ISP and was told what I expected: We had defied our final warning, so the ISP turned off our email. I dutifully reported this to Chip and Dale.

How can that be, Dale asked. I used my home Internet connection for the email blast, so the ISP shouldn’t have complained. I showed him the language of the service contract and explained you couldn’t get around the rules that easily. The email had included a link to our website, and that was covered by the no-spamming rules.

The new COO steps in

Our COO was a very recent hire who had been unaware of all that had been going on. When he stepped in to the meeting, I brought him up to speed. Over the next few days, “Tom” had several strained meetings with Chip and Dale, met with me a few more times, and investigated further.

Then he got on the phone with the ISP’s abuse department. After a very long conversation, he somehow convinced the ISP to turn our email back on, despite the fact that, as the abuse department said, there was “not a reason in the world” to do so. Tom was very angry at Chip and Dale for not heeding my warnings and tried very hard to get them to switch to an opt-in system, but he had no more success than I did.

Chip and Dale continued to insist the rules did not apply to them. Our email was disconnected for about four days total, but they still refused to implement an opt-in system.

Their solution was to find an ISP that did not have antispamming rules, install a second connection with that ISP solely for spamming, and make sure that the marketing emails did not violate the primary ISP’s terms of service in any way. In other words, the company would obey the letter of the ISP’s contract, but not its spirit.

It worked. We never heard anything more from the ISP’s abuse department, and our email was never disconnected again.

When I left the company, Chip and Dale were still doing business that way, just as convinced as they were at the beginning of the whole mess that their behavior was perfectly ethical. I’m older and wiser now, and I cringe when I think about ever having been a part of such a company, even as someone who was trying to get the execs to do the right thing and protect them from their own behavior. At least I can console myself with knowing that I tried. And I learned to be more cynical about people’s ways of doing business.

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This story, “What part of ‘no spam’ don’t you understand?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.