Is it against the TOS to invite members of other groups that you belong to to your newly formed group?

Question

I am/was a member of 15 differnent yahoo groups over the past 5 months or so. I recently started my own yahoo group and invited individual members from the other groups that I belong to by sending a private invitations. All the email addresses I sent the invitations to were posted publically on the groups.

I went through the TOS before I did send any invitations and do not see any thing stating that that is "wrong" to send invitations this way. Did I miss something?? Because all "heck" has broken loose and I have been accused of stealing email addresses. I am horrified at these accusations!

Don't yahoo group members each have the ability to set up their account to accept invites or not?

Answer 1

harvesting email addresses is very much frowned upon both by the law and yahoo tos...

whether you meant it badly or not, this is a spammer tactic, and will get you branded as one too - even though they were visible in the group, collecting them probably breaches it, as you don't have permission from the group or members to do so

there is an option to stop invites, but as many people aren't very web-literate they won't have activated this

Answer 2

When someone tries to do that on my groups I put them on moderation.  INMHO it's very tacky and an attempt to steal members.

Answer 3

there's a message right on the invites:

"(Please use this feature responsibly and don't spam people you don't know. Invitation abuse can lead to inactivation of your account.)"

what you did was against TOS if you didn't know those members and is considered spam when you use their addresses for the purpose of invites.

yes. there is a setting to prevent getting invites and adds, but it's a shame anyone has to activate that setting just to avoid invites from unknown people.

Answer 4

There's no problem with inviting members of other gropus to join your newly formed group.