Just wanted to say thanks for the brainstorming help last night on dealing with the spam-lovin' board member. What I ended up with, in a *very* summarized form, is:
[dude's name],
You say that you'll add all your own club members to the list, and I wouldn't presume to tell you not to -- it's your club and your membership list. However, I don't believe we should make it a recommendation for all clubs. We should enlist our club contacts' help in promoting the list at their clubs, but I'm very much opposed to asking them to turn over their email lists without their members' explicit permission.
1. Our agreement with [host] specifies that we cannot use their servers for bulk e-mail, or in any way that violates people's privacy. You can argue all day that our list doesn't do that, but all it takes is one complaint and we're shut down. They're a great host, but any internet service knows that if they get onto any of the spam blacklists, their service, and all of their other users, are in trouble. There is no leeway in the hosting business for this kind of thing.
2. You say there's no legal problem because we aren't selling fake Rolexes. This is simply not true: for instance, can you really be sure that there are no clubs in the division with kids on their email lists? It's against federal law to collect information about children online without their parents' explicit permission, EVEN if you're a non-commercial site. "Information", in this case, means their names and hobbies -- not just their home phone numbers or bank accounts. And that's just one law, and not an exhaustive study of the matter.
Furthermore, you simply can't say that nobody will get sued, or that you yourself are willing to be sued -- again, all it takes is one pissed-off person, and even if we win, [org] is out the time and hassle and legal fees. There's never any guarantee against litigious jerks, but let's not open ourselves up to the risk by doing something that's certain to anger people.
This is not to say that I think we shouldn't promote list membership. In fact, I think it's vitally important that we do so. But spamming people isn't the way to go about it. Your insistence that any opposition to your position is fearing the list, or destroying it, is just a straw man. The possible choices are not limited to "sign up everyone" vs. "let the list molder away in a dark dusty corner".
In fact, since I really don't like either of those options, I say we focus on more ways to get people to sign up voluntarily:
* (6 different ideas I came up with in about 5 minutes)
* Most importantly of all -- these are all ideas off the top of my head. Rather than shutting down the discussion, we should be coming up with more.
Once again, let me reiterate that I agree with your fundamental point that we need to get information out better. It's just signing people up without their approval that I don't like.