Would you capitalize on somebody else's mistake?
Curious to hear people's opinion on this situation.
Somebody emailed me yesterday with a little update email about their product. They mistakenly CCed the entire list instead of BCCing the list.
One person used the opportunity to market their product to the entire list.
And then another did the same.
Would you do the same, or do you think it's bad practice to exploit an honest mistake?
#ask-ih
That would be not appropriate. Usually it called as SPAM.
I'm constantly surprised by how many people still send emails to lists via BCC.
I'd understand if Aweber or Mailchimp were the only options, but these days Amazon AWS and companies like EmailOctopus, Sendy etc. make it so cheap to send emails without having to resort to BCC (which inevitably ends up being sent in CC one day)
I definitely wouldn't do the same. And I'd cut anyone out from my radar who would take advantage of someone in that situation.
Sounds unethical and definitely within scope of being a spam.
wait... it's not related to https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scoops/-Lg_XZTXQO8lv2M4T9zT is it?
But yeah, no, don't do that, that's spam (as someone else on this thread pointed out).
People like that are bottom-feeders. As IH has clearly shown, their bad behavior flourishes if there's no cost for it.
If I were truly poor and living in a low-trust society where nobody gave a shit, I'd do the same (or else lose to the competition). In any reasonably sane ecosystem, I'd never do that.
Definitely seems well out-of-bounds, IMO. TBH, taking advantage of any else's list without their permission seems like a pretty obvious no-go. Shocked that a couple of people jumped on that.
Life is too short to do stuff like that.
If you were the person making the mistake, what would you want others to do?
That's definitely my point about it... if we're all in this crazy life together, I would hope folks would have some decency about it instead of immediately jumping at the chance of exploiting the situation.
I think what really blew my mind is that the second person to reply to everybody is a Business Development & Strategy Executive. I mean, I completely understand the "do any and everything to get ahead" but I would expect somebody at such a high level in their career to NOT need to resort to such tactics.
And when called on it, they cited that it was a joke....
For me personally, I wouldn't want somebody to do that to me, so I consider it bad form to reply back to the entire list, especially to try to market something of my own.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
This is true, you never know where a kind gesture can lead you. Stepping up to help this person out who made an honest mistake might prove to them that you're someone they want on their side, in a professional sense. It could open up opportunities that you wouldn't expect.