Re: The #1 thing I hate is messing with e mail lists, so the chances....

I think that if you are their bona-fide customer, they can send you info about what else they have available. Most places that I can remember have a "privacy policy" or some such link near where you sign up and you agree to whatever it says before you submit your info. If it says they have the right to contact you again with more offers, then you agreed to accept them without reporting spam. If it says they will not share your address with anyone and you get offers to the e-mail address you signed up with from somebody else, bust 'em! How do you keep track? I use a different e-mail address for everything anymore and they all funnel into my main one. And yes I watch.

Back in my more naive days, I responded to a "request for more information" which I now recognize as manually harvesting e-mail addresses. You can read the whole article I wrote about spam here if you want:

http://www.123iwork4me.com/article212.html

or just the paragraph about the one incident:

Let me give you an example from o­ne that o­nce came across my screen. It seemed to be from a nice lady with homey graphics and nice colors in her e-mail. If my memory serves me well, she even stated that she was disabled and looking for ways to earn a living off the internet. In my mind, that’s a hard combination to resist. A great deal of effort was put into this to make it sound as if she had built an internet community around her site and services. Maybe she did; I don’t know. Anyway, I was naïve enough to respond with the information she had requested. Soon solicitations for this, that, and whatever business offer, etc. began arriving in my inbox. I finally put two and two together and realized that they were from her, but I was still reluctant to report it as spam, so her messages went quietly into the trash. I mean, she seemed SO NICE! Then I got this huffy message, apparently broadcast to her entire mailing list, about how if people didn’t want to receive her messages, why didn’t they just unsubscribe, etc. It seems quite a few people had reported her as a spammer and she was getting into trouble. It was time for me to respond, so I told her, bluntly, that what she was sending out WAS spam. It was unsolicited. I never signed up to be o­n her mailing list, and no doubt the people who had reported her never signed up to be o­n her mailing list, either. I o­nly responded to a request FROM HER for information and that in no way implied that I wanted to be o­n her mailing list or that I wanted to receive her offers. She must have gotten the message because I have received nothing else from her.

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In this case, what she did was wrong because she was broadcasting her offers to people who definitely had not requested any info from her at all.

In your case, if you were to send offers to everyone who had ever posted to this board, you might be on thin ice. If you had people check a box to receive either offers or a monthly newsletter when they bought something from you, and you included offers or reminders of what else you have available as part of the newsletter, or sent out info about newly added stuff to "your line of products" then you would be fine.