Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing in 1999. Ten years later, most media companies don't understand the concept still. As Seth explains in the book and in his blog numerous times, when I give you my email address, it is a trust issue. I trust that you will not spam me; inundate me with off-topic email; and most importantly not sell my email address to third parties -- even if they are your partners. 

All too often, when I sign up for an event, I get inundated with email from the vendors of the event. This irks me for a number of reasons, but mostly because I did not give my email address to them.

This is a failure on so many levels. The media company has a database of email addresses that are mostly "junk". By that I mean. yahoo, hotmail, and the like. That means they are likely not sending email that will not be read.

An advertiser is paying to send an email that will be likely read. It does no good to pay for 5000 emails if 4500 of them are worthless, unopened, bounced or sitting in an email box that gets opened infrequently.

By the way, the CAN-SPAM Act is one thing, but your media company brand gets destroyed by these kind of hijinks. Act accordingly.