What is an "Email Now"?

Some businesses & organisations get confused when they fill out our business register and are told they have to be on MSC Coast News to have an "Email Now" facility.
There are 2 reasons for doing this and they are both important.

• To ensure that your Email Address is always valid and correct for a visitor to use via the "email now" system.
• To ensure that we are fully complying with the Spam Act 2003 in relation to receiving email contact from visitors to our site VIA our site "email now" system.

In each category, the businesses are listed in order of Most information available to the Visitor to least information available:

1.Category Sponsor: Shows as a banner on the top of each page in that category
2.Premium Listing: the ones with the thumbnail picture where you can click through to a full page display on the business complete with web links and photo gallery.
3.Advanced Listing: Business card style advertising, very rare to be seen onsite as they are only available to a business that has maxed out the allowed 'email nows' yet wish to maintain their email on their listing.
4.Free Business Listings with contact facility: These are the listings with an "Email Now" and a tagline description of the business.
5.Free Business Listings, no contact: At the very end of the category come the businesses that have no "Email Now" and no "Tag line Description", just a phone number.

Email Validation:

Information on listings being accurate is important to us, you as a business, and also to the visitor looking at these pages. People are happy to tell us they have a new business, not so quick to tell us they have gone out of business, hence the need to be on MSC Coast News. All email that bounces on MSC Coast News is checked. If an email bounces 3 times, we then phone the company, or double check if they still have a website. If we find that we cannot contact that business then we remove it from display. If the business is still active, but changing email etc then we just remove the email address (so that a visitor is not inconvenienced by wasting their time trying to use the "Email Now" and not getting a response).

Basically, having your business email address on your free listing on MSC Coast News means that we can validate that the address is correct every few weeks. We don't mind if you receive "Coast News" and then delete it straight away, or don't bother reading but enter the 'giveaways', fine, no skin off our noses, but it means that our system knows your email is still valid, we can then keep your "Email Now" active, a visitor to the site can still easily contact you (without having your email on display for spammers), you stay higher up the list in your particular category, and we are all happy.

Obviously with the amount of traffic onsite and the prolific use of the "Email Now" system, it costs us a fortune on the servers, which is why we only allow a certain amount to go through before we ask that you upgrade your business, or we remove your email and you go further down the list, giving other businesses the opportunity to move up the list. We do not like doing this, though unfortunately economics dictate that we cannot allow unlimited free "email nows" on every business forever or we would soon be out of business and there would be no display at all for both businesses on the coast and our visitors to use.

The Spam Act 2003:

Another aspect of the "Email Now" connection with "MSC Coast News" is that the Spam Act 2003 can be interpreted a number of ways when it comes to email that goes to a business "via" a 3rd party (the 3rd party being our "email now" system). For a person to send an email to a business "unsolicited" which is requesting information that is legitimate (a sales request, quote request etc) is perfectly legal and not spam, hence even if that person is using our "email now" system and not their own email programme is fine and legal, though of course we prefer to always be extremely ethical in all our dealings, therefore, when you agree to receive "MSC Coast News" you are agreeing to receive email from us and more importantly VIA us.

We hope the above has explained the Free Business Listings to you and their relationship to the "Email Now" system. If you still have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us and we are always happy to chat to with you :)