Can I send email to others to promote my site?

The short answer is NO!

Please review our Acceptable Usage Policies and Spam Policy page!

Such unsolicited email messages are catagorized as UCE ( Unsolicited Commerical Email). An extensive effort among the Internet software and engineering community has been devoted to the prevention, blocking, and countering of such activities, which are better known as spamming. It is a guaranteed way of inviting retaliation acts such as mail bombs, blocking of access privileges, and even lawsuits.

Furthermore, again in the US, legal precedents have been established and have always favored the receiving side, such as the high profile case of CompuServe vs. Cyberpromo. Because of this case, and other misdeeds, Cyberpromo has become a truly despised entity on the Internet, and has been the target of complete access blocking at many Internet sites in many different countries. Even other sites started by former Cyberpromo principals remain blocked by several Internet Service Providers

By engaging in such activities, it's very likely that you will not only get yourself into legal trouble, but also bring negative impact to your hosting company since most sites receiving your UCEs will complain to your ISP.

However, any self-respecting ISP has an explicit policy that bans such activities altogether, treating them as grounds for termination of services without any compensation. ISPs who don't ban spamming are often blocked by other ISPs and organizations. Even Microsoft's MSN network once was blocked worldwide for several days in a row for being too lax on spammers that used its servers to relay UCE's.

For the record, AZC.COM has always had a policy that prohibits spamming since the company's inception in July, 1995.

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