e-mailing people in California / the USA

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e-mailing people in California / the USA

Makaveli2007

3:46 pm on Feb 25, 2024 (gmt 0)

Hello,

I was trying to figure out which forum to ask this question on - I simply couldn't find a forum about e-mail-stuff, e-mail marketing or anything related to e-mails.... so I'll pick this forum (I hope it's okay if I ask this, here).

Are you allowed to e-mail people in the US (specifically California) if you're not trying to sell anything to them? Could I e-mail a college professor in California whose e-mail is on his website and ask him a question about his research?

I assume as long as I don't try to sell anything to anybody, don't drop any (commercial) URL's there shouldn't be a problem? (and if I don't try to e-mail a second time in case the person doesn't reply).

Is my understanding correct?

not2easy

3:53 pm on Feb 25, 2024 (gmt 0)

Contact forms and publicly available emails are intended for contacting people who share the information. Spamming is generally not welcome but questions are usually welcome and answered (if relevant to their site). If your intentions are communication, no problem. Insistent emails might be considered spam. There is a different standard for commercial emails, marketing emails.

lucy24

6:03 pm on Feb 25, 2024 (gmt 0)

:: head spinning ::

Where do you live, that it is socially taboo (or illegal?) to send non-commercial email to someone you don’t know?

Yes, absolutely email that professor. 9 times out of 10 they will be thrilled to answer. (This is assuming you are not, say, asking Neil Degrasse Tyson how far it is to the moon or any similar 90-second-google question.) Consider:

[xkcd.com...]

tangor

6:54 pm on Feb 25, 2024 (gmt 0)

Contact form emails are always open for public use, else they wouldn't be posted.

Sending a query is not normally considered spam, but repeated and insistent attempts might be.

Folks who post their email addresses to the web know they are going to get skimmed off by spammers and phishers, so they generally take steps on the receiving end to filter out such garbage.

Makaveli2007

9:21 pm on Feb 25, 2024 (gmt 0)

@lucy: I live in Germany, I don't think it's more of a taboo here (or more likely to be illegal) than in the US / California to send e-mails to strangers.

tangor + not2easy .... both of you hinted at the problem, that sending insistent e-mails might be a problem. So basically if you were to send a stranger an e-mail with a question (e.g. a college professor) on the internet.....and the person chose not to reply, but then you sent them another e-mail, you might have a legal problem? This is something I had read a couple of years ago, I think.

Are you 100% (or well 99%) sure, that when it comes to non-commercial e-mails only insistent e-mails are a problem?

thanks.

not2easy

9:33 pm on Feb 25, 2024 (gmt 0)

you might have a legal problem?

Not so much a legal problem (that would take more than a few extra emails) but it could cause your ISP (or email originating domain's mail-server) to be on blacklists that might prevent email deliveries if they cannot prevent you any other way for excessive or abusive emailing.

tangor

11:56 pm on Feb 25, 2024 (gmt 0)

It depends on what you call excessive.

A followup query a week or two later won't be a problem.

As not2easy says, if the attempts become onerous the recipient might begin reporting your emails as spam/undesired and YOUR mail server (and specifically your email address) will end up blacklists across the web.

Got to ask: is there no other source for the query other than "the one" email address? I find that hard to believe.

Makaveli2007

10:15 am on Feb 26, 2024 (gmt 0)

I'm not saying it'd be impossible to find the information I'm looking for elsewhere, but I really don't know where to find it, right now, so it'd definitely be more difficult.

I assumed it shouldn't be a problem, that's why I was going to ask that specific person. I just wanted to clarify - once everybody tells me it isn't a problem, I'll just do it.

I also wanted to figure out if there were any problems associated with sending e-mails to people on the internet (professors or webmasters) in general, because it's something I might want to do again in the future.

lucy24

7:14 pm on Feb 26, 2024 (gmt 0)

Are you sure you’re really, literally talking about sending one email to one relevant authority asking one question that that person is best qualified to answer? I can't help wondering if someone near and dear to you was once traumatized by a similar experience, and now you’re deathly afraid to do this perfectly reasonable thing.

The worst that can happen is that the person ignores your question, in which case you move on to Expert #2.

Makaveli2007

8:00 pm on Feb 26, 2024 (gmt 0)

In my last reply, in the last paragraph I stated that I was generally wondering if sending e-mails to strangers on the internet (professors, academics, webmasters) wasn't a problem, at all. So in a way I was not just wondering about a single e-mail to a single authority asking a single question, but in general, too.

Once, everybody replies and agrees there aren't any problems doing this, I guess we could kind of end this thread - it's all I needed to know. thanks