We're sorry for all the survey spam, but I can't promise we'll stop anytime soon

Mitch Joel has every right to be angry about receiving spam from legitimate businesses. On behalf of the entire MR community I would like to admit that we're guilty of every dirty trick he described, apologize for our clueless and irresponsible abuse of email, and explain why we're not motivated to fix it.

Mitch received a marketing email, but there are plenty of survey-related analogues. The best example I can think of is the blinded B2B survey. Some of our clients are willing to pay top dollar for the thoughts and opinions of professional groups like IT decision makers and doctors, but they don’t want to be identified as the survey sponsor because it would bias the results. To make matters worse the email addresses of the people they want to survey can often be harvested pretty easily from public web sites or purchased from companies that specialize in that kind of thing. The end result is lots of pissed-off people complaining that research company XYZ is sending spam.

Just because we can find their contact information doesn’t mean these people want to hear from us, and online that matters … a lot. Naturally we can’t help ourselves, these projects are lucrative and we are in the business of making money. We must stop because this kind of email abuse is tarnishing our online reputation and destroying our already low response rates. Sadly, I don't see (m)any people looking for better alternatives.