As a professional in this field, I assume you are aware that "spam" is also known as "UCE", which stands for "unsolicited commercial email," and "UBE", which stands for "unsolicited bulk email." Note how "unsolicited" is right there in both of them.

Good point. Unsolicited communication is not positive on certain situations. Though by your tone, every form of unsolicited commercial communication is unwanted. If this were the case, Google would be dirt poor due to their ads system being a failure.

The difference between "shaking hands and smiling" and what you are describing is that shaking hands and smiling is something you do one-to-one. Buying a list and blasting email to it is not. It's not personal, it's not individual. It's more like using a dialer to blast faxes to fax machines than any one-on-one salesmanship.

Sending a personalized email to each person in a group of people is the same as shaking their hand as smiling. It is personal, and it is individual. You may be confusing it with other techniques you may use. But my experience and focus shows that personalized and individual communication is not to be confused with spam. And not, its not like sending out faxes like a madman.

And more importantly, you're not allowing people to opt out. There are a range of body language indicators and other social cues that people can use to tell you your smile and handshake are not wanted. Someone who happens to end up on a list you bought has no such recourse.

Where does it say that people cannot opt out? Again, you seem to be approaching this from an uninformed angle. And you are right. People do end up in malining lists. Is it bad? No. Should they be able to opt out? Definitely. I receive a lot of catalogs by email and regular mail. My child has personally benefited from me buying from such catalogs (she has asthma). Is it of no value then? Is it unlike a friendly salesman coming by my home and showing me a product that will benefit my child? No.

Yes. Yes you are. Ethical marketers build their list via opt-in mechanisms. Your mechanism is the opposite: you assume everyone on your purchased list wants your messages, and force them to opt out if they do not. In other words, you are creating work for the people on your list who don't want your messages. Which means that for those folks, not only are you not adding value to their lives, you are subtracting value by creating a new problem they have to deal with where none existed before.

Do not even dare to insult me publicly my calling me unethical. If you cannot provide a coherent arguement then do not post. Such attitude only shows that you are unequipped to handle a mature discussion.

Now, to refute your point:

Ethics vary from people to people, culture to culture, markets to markets. You cannot tie yourself down to ethics because you will never succeed at being 100% ethical. I'm not saying you should not make it a priority to be ethical, but that you should be pragmmatic about it. I do not take lightly when someone stands up and screams about being an "Ethical Marketer." It shows that they have no clue about different cultures and society. Of course, you should never do anything illegal and/or immoral. But ethics are too wide to comply with all. What one should aim for is to judge their marketing in the following manner: Am I providing value to people? Am I violating their privacy? Am I abusing their trust?

Opt-in marketing, otherwise known as permission based marketing is one of the many techniques you can use to generate a mailing list of pre-qualified customers. But in your "Ethical Marketer" world, how would a business create such list if they cannot, by your definition, even do a cold mailing on a given demographic?

Opt-in marketing works when you already have a marketing campaign running. But you will always, always end up communicating unsolicitied commercial messages because, and pay attention, everything you say, do, or write about your business is a commercial message. So if I submit a blog post about how I wrote a book that benefits startups, and provide a link for them to buy it, then, by your definition, I'm being unethical because they did not opt-in. So we can go ahead and call patio11 an unethical marketer because he posts about his business from time to time. We should also call every startup out there who is trying to gain some traction by writing good informative posts about the problems they are aiming to fix a spammer. Because its unethical due to me not being able to opt in!

In my experience, the people who shout most loudly about their sterling ethics and critical importance are usually the least ethical and least important. YMMV, of course.

I've been told worse insults by better people.

Edit

I visited your website. http://jasonlefkowitz.net/
Its full of unsolicited commercial messages.

You have:

On the bottom right corner an advertisement for a fonts website. I did not solicit that advertisement. How do I opt out, even though I have Ad-block?

On your about page, you have about 16 different unsolicited marketing messages. You coul dhave just written a nice about page about who you are. But you chose to spam (by your definition) people with every link to your business.

And I know you will say that I decided to visit the page, thus I solicited it. Not quite. I visited your page to learn more about you. Not about what your business does. I sincerely took my time to see who you were and where you are coming from. Hey, maybe this guy has been dealing with asshole marketers all his life. Maybe I can help him out in any way. But no. All you did was talk about your business, so I would subscribe to your mailing list, Facebook page, twitter account, AOL IM, Flickr, LinkedIn, and blog.

Still, I wish you good luck. And do send me unsolicited email from time to time. Address in profile.