I hate spamming too, but I have some sympathy for beginning web businesses who don't have a zillion dollars marketing budgets, and without a working crystal ball really have no idea how to register anywhere respectable on search engines (who seem to spend their time brewing up new ways of making visibility impossible). I don't spam - I've done as much as I can by way of site design and amateurish attempts at optimisation, used free link exchanges (most of whom don't seem to count with Google), press releases, newspaper ads, free online classifieds etc etc etc and all I can say is, "Thank God I've got a day job!". Although I spend more time on my site than I do at my salaried job. I'm beginning to agree with the notion that search engines should be structured around location and business type, because at the moment, the big guys are winning hands down!

But, that would not be spam then. Is it OK for a company selling sleep aids to mass-email 20 million people to sell them? :?:

I highly doubt that company knows 20 million people personaly and that they realy need help so, that would be the spam you would want shove it down the senders throte (and that's not the meat in the can). Conclusion: 99.99999999999998% of the time a mass-email to 20 million people is not primarialy for the indual customer, but for the profit of the company; this IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!!!
Oh yea, one last thing: If a company sent me spam and they had no intention of actualy helping me with a problem that I had then their reputation with me would suffer.

~Sparkplug188

Spamming is becoming more and more unpopular and in most places illegal. As a Web Host I've had to deal with a few in my time and they are typically people who are extrememly greedy and completely inconiderate of others. Spaming is a problem that needs fixing. The email servers (exim) need to be improved to better combat spam. For example emails can be sent anonymously quite easily - this needs to change with better ways of tracking down spammers by IP location - right down to the ISP. I also think proxy software has to be updated to also force better logging of the original source IP.

Oh and one other thing. They should have spam blacklists that a DOMAIN specific and not IP specific. OR if they remain IP specific then when IPv6 comes out they should make it mandatory for ALL websites to have a unique IP.

spamming is a mass posting - so do you think you get the same negative effects if you were to do self promoting posts that are on topic?

Personally I'll only self-promote on a forum in my signature or if it's a forum that's specifically meant for advertising (ie marketplace forum). It might just be me, but the fact that a representative from a company posts to a forum at all gives them a little less weight in my eyes - it makes the company seem smaller for some reason. I know this is a bad thing to think because even GoogleGuy is a Google rep who posts to various webmaster/SEO forums, but, well, I dunno. Ignore me :)