2009-01-27 by  Derek Vaughan

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A debate is raging over the definition of spam. The debate stems from a promotional campaign created and distributed by AT&T. As reported earlier this week by the New York Times and other prominent news outlets, AT&T sent text messages to a ''significant number'' of its 75 million customers. As a sponsor of the television program 'American Idol', AT&T was texting the customers and urging them to tune into the season premiere of the show. This is where the controversy comes in.

According to information released by AT&T, the text advertisement told recipients to ''Get ready for American Idol''. The text then pointed them to a promotional website with an AT&T American Idol sweepstakes. AT&T also pointed out that recipients were not charged for the message, and that they could opt out of future advertisements by responding with the word ''stop''.

Many of the recipients of the text message were outraged calling the text messages ''spam''. AT&T countered that argument and claimed that the text was not spam because it was free and because it allowed people to decline future messages.

So is this type of text message spam? Here is what a few industry experts had to say on the subject.

The New York Times article quotes one expert, Mr. Richard Cox, the Chief Information Officer for the nonprofit antispam organization Spamhaus as saying, ''It's absolutely spam. It's an unsolicited text message. People who received it didn't ask for it. That’s the universal definition of spam.''

Mr. Nils Decker is CMO with anti-spam software company SpamExperts. Mr. Decker assesses the text messages this way, ''This very clearly is an example of spam. The recipients of the messages (to my knowledge) never ''opted-in'' in any way whatsoever to receive the messages. It was a pure advertisement of AT&T related products, services and sponsorship-involvements. The reasoning that the messages were ''free'', of course, only supports the fact that it is spam. Spammers never charge their recipients for unsolicited bulk messages they receive.

If the General Terms & Conditions of using any AT&T services would include the possibility of ''opting-in'' such services, the story would be a different one. SpamExperts underwrites the project SpamDefinition.org, which allows companies and organizations to support the spam definitions provided on the website. According to the definitions provided, AT&T clearly sent out SMS-Spam in the case at hand.''

Daniel Foster is co-founder of 34SP.com, a business web hosting provider which works with tens of thousands of client business emails each day. Mr. Foster concluded, ''What AT&T did is the very definition of spam - they sent a bulk unsolicited commercial message. If users had previously voted in American Idol, they may have agreed to receive such messages but in this case they do not appear to have made such an agreement. Sending to anyone else is certainly spamming them. Business professionals and online businesses should always avoid this type of promotional activity. At the end of the day, if the recipient of the message feels like a message is spam, it probably is.''

One recipient of the text message, Mr. Jeremy Sikora, pointed out in his blog that while a one time message isn't a big deal the future of this activity would be harmful. ''Now imagine this - all TV shows start advertising this way, then add movies, or random products. Sounds like this has the possibility to become very annoying sometime in the future.''

So the consensus points to the AT&T text messages as spam. Regardless of the exact definition of this type of promotion, one thing is for sure - if unsolicited text messaging sells products, then it will be with us for a long time to come.

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