I don’t understand why they need a reason, if the mailing list software was sensible then all you would need to do is reply to the email with the word unsubscribe or similar in the body and it would remove you. As for taking 3 days to do it who knows.
Somebody somewhere must be collecting all these messages or what is the point of asking the question, and if it is taking 3 days then it has do some poor fool who is doing it manually.
Bloody hell, you've hit the nail on the head again. Although *only* 36 hours? A couple I've unsubscribed from recently are up to 28 days! I just don't understand it. As you alluded to with Amazon we used to have to wait 28 days for mail order items and we can do that, in some cases, same day so how on Earth does it take up to 28 days to un-f---ing-subscribe from a mailing list?!
Just before I read this I was trying to get PayPal to let me alone. I only needed PayPal once, years ago for one purchase. The goods were only obtainable using PayPal. Despite trying to unsubscribe, they insist they need to update me. Bastards. I've never understood why it exists when credit cards work but never mind. Good article anyhow.
Oct 21, 2022·edited Oct 21, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
You see… errr, well…The automated mail merge that floods your inbox with quality HMTL content (aka marketing material) only gets run every 28 days. Until then you’ll stay on our notification list so there’s a chance you’ll come back when we have a sale and buy something! Unless we’re SCS in which case we always have a sale on.
We’re also offered discounts for the amount of email content we send out, and shuffling a new list to tomorrows marketing provider with less than 24 hours to go isn’t something we do lightly. You didn’t think we’d use our own email service for marketing, did you?
P.S. I’m not a marketer, don’t use such services, and also wish there was a more satisfying way of observing spam being trashed (or even reports back in a week with ‘We’ve noted your spam designation, and based on this and other user feedback, we’ve stopped x,xxx instances of this email reaching our customer inboxes, then I can mark this as spam and watch the wheels of IT go into a tailspin.)
Oct 21, 2022·edited Oct 21, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
The worst for me are the emails from Corporate - I work for a niche arm of a very large multinational, and we are spammed constantly at work by messages that the system (google based :-( ) is configured not to allow us to block as spam. Why would I care about a job advert in a completely unrelated field and likely in a foreign country too? Or a marketing announcement about another division's niche products scratching an itch I don't share.
Even terrible email service providers (which is nearly all of them to be honest) support instant unsubscribing in their APIs, so delaying an unsubscribe is just dickheadery by the owners of the mailing list.
There's another side to the irritation of unsubscribing (as if I needed reminding) and it's when you try to sign up to some professional publication which might be of interest. They're not interested unless your job-title includes CTO/CEO and so considered worthy of receiving their (99.9% marketing) publication.
The internet has made it so much easier to produce barefaced lies which, in the past, you would make you blush.
Of course I am the big cheese. My salary is mind-bogglingly high. I spend a lot. Yes, I specify exactly what to buy. Yes, I place the order personally. My budget would get me into space. I was talking to Elon and Jeff just the other day.
One publication I still get has a rule that you must re-enrol every year to ensure you fulfil the high-importance hurdles. It's years since my 'elegant' application and I've never renewed it. One of its selling points is that it's only distributed to executives in the industry, which I'm not. To be honest, I've not tried unsubscribing as I was never eligible.
Oct 21, 2022·edited Oct 21, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
VERY occasionally, companies get their mailing lists right.
There's on company who send me emails regularly. Usually they are promotions for things I don't need, or can't afford, but I find them interesting anyway When I do buy things from them, they don't increase the number of emails sent my way.
I've sent them an email thanking them.
Compare that with a company I bought some bathroom fittings from when my parents were refurbing. I had to hand over an email address to organise collection timings.
For no reason whatsoever, they assumed that I must be upgrading every bathroom in the county. Spam arrived several times a day, until their company went bust four years later. No Unsubscribe possible.
At least email spam remains relatively controllable with a variety of tricks and methods. SMS and vocal spam on the other hand. Car dealer networks being particularly annoying.
ChurchSuite (church admin sw) has a lovely feature. At the bottom of all emails sent out, there is a link titled FORGET ME. It has the effect of sending another email to an admin with a button that basically nukes that person from the contacts database. Very GDPR compliant. Perhaps the link could be changed to F@@@ OFF AND DIE for those more smarmy emails?
Oct 22, 2022·edited Oct 22, 2022Liked by Alistair Dabbs
Oh, I've had an entirely new form of spam show up: IN MY LOGFILES. No, I kid you not, I'll paste the thing below. Worse is that it is from the people who are supposed to help you AGAINST that sort of pollution. I sent them a WTF message and got some woolly excuse plus a removal deadline - here too, they apparently need a week. I hope that doesn't match the detection speed of their firewalls..
Anyway, pasted verbatim from Apache's access.log:
205.210.31.31 - - [21/Oct/2022:02:34:52 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 199 "-" "[xxx, a yyy Networks company, searches across the global IPv4 space multiple times per day to identify customers' presences on the Internet. If you would like to be excluded from our scans, please send IP addresses/domains to: <email address>"
Yes, they did that. If this sets through I will soon no longer be able to detect breach attempts in between the marketing messages..
Mercedes does this too. I once had to use a Mercedes (an A200 that the company insisted I use), and five years later I still get updates about changing Terms, despite having informed them repeatedly that I don't have any Merc anymore. Where I live the regulators have a cunning trick to cut down on the number of privacy complaints they handle: the form you have to fill in is so long and (ironically) demands so many personal details that you're more likey to give up than complete the complaint. I too have not yet found the time to complete that obstacle course..
…when some of the darkest and most cynical minds in technology are struggling, I doubt I can shed any light. …but whilst ‘unsubscribe me’ might not win any prizes for literature and passes a basic grammar check , it fails ‘anagram-maticaly’. Rearranging the letters of ‘unsubscribe me’ gives ‘unsub be crimes’ and obviously it can’t let you do something illegal!
When I feel particularly fueled with vengeance, I turn the dial to 11 and just email the DPO of whatever shitty company is harassing me, threatening to the ICO for lack of GDPR compliance.
Usually, follows a prompt reply that my request has been processed.
I like to imagine whoevere is stopping the spam take all their crappy emails, put them in a bag, take the first turn right and fuck right off.
I don’t understand why they need a reason, if the mailing list software was sensible then all you would need to do is reply to the email with the word unsubscribe or similar in the body and it would remove you. As for taking 3 days to do it who knows.
Somebody somewhere must be collecting all these messages or what is the point of asking the question, and if it is taking 3 days then it has do some poor fool who is doing it manually.
I shall have to try filling in “I’m an idiot and compulsive masturbator and do not know any better”, the next time I’m offered the “Other” option.
Bloody hell, you've hit the nail on the head again. Although *only* 36 hours? A couple I've unsubscribed from recently are up to 28 days! I just don't understand it. As you alluded to with Amazon we used to have to wait 28 days for mail order items and we can do that, in some cases, same day so how on Earth does it take up to 28 days to un-f---ing-subscribe from a mailing list?!
Rant over, time for a pint.
Just before I read this I was trying to get PayPal to let me alone. I only needed PayPal once, years ago for one purchase. The goods were only obtainable using PayPal. Despite trying to unsubscribe, they insist they need to update me. Bastards. I've never understood why it exists when credit cards work but never mind. Good article anyhow.
You see… errr, well…The automated mail merge that floods your inbox with quality HMTL content (aka marketing material) only gets run every 28 days. Until then you’ll stay on our notification list so there’s a chance you’ll come back when we have a sale and buy something! Unless we’re SCS in which case we always have a sale on.
We’re also offered discounts for the amount of email content we send out, and shuffling a new list to tomorrows marketing provider with less than 24 hours to go isn’t something we do lightly. You didn’t think we’d use our own email service for marketing, did you?
P.S. I’m not a marketer, don’t use such services, and also wish there was a more satisfying way of observing spam being trashed (or even reports back in a week with ‘We’ve noted your spam designation, and based on this and other user feedback, we’ve stopped x,xxx instances of this email reaching our customer inboxes, then I can mark this as spam and watch the wheels of IT go into a tailspin.)
The worst for me are the emails from Corporate - I work for a niche arm of a very large multinational, and we are spammed constantly at work by messages that the system (google based :-( ) is configured not to allow us to block as spam. Why would I care about a job advert in a completely unrelated field and likely in a foreign country too? Or a marketing announcement about another division's niche products scratching an itch I don't share.
Even terrible email service providers (which is nearly all of them to be honest) support instant unsubscribing in their APIs, so delaying an unsubscribe is just dickheadery by the owners of the mailing list.
There's another side to the irritation of unsubscribing (as if I needed reminding) and it's when you try to sign up to some professional publication which might be of interest. They're not interested unless your job-title includes CTO/CEO and so considered worthy of receiving their (99.9% marketing) publication.
The internet has made it so much easier to produce barefaced lies which, in the past, you would make you blush.
Of course I am the big cheese. My salary is mind-bogglingly high. I spend a lot. Yes, I specify exactly what to buy. Yes, I place the order personally. My budget would get me into space. I was talking to Elon and Jeff just the other day.
One publication I still get has a rule that you must re-enrol every year to ensure you fulfil the high-importance hurdles. It's years since my 'elegant' application and I've never renewed it. One of its selling points is that it's only distributed to executives in the industry, which I'm not. To be honest, I've not tried unsubscribing as I was never eligible.
Of course that's an Error, their spam is INTERESTING!
By the way, if that's a proper Lancashire Corned Beef or Tater Hash, send some my way please, I've not had any for years.
VERY occasionally, companies get their mailing lists right.
There's on company who send me emails regularly. Usually they are promotions for things I don't need, or can't afford, but I find them interesting anyway When I do buy things from them, they don't increase the number of emails sent my way.
I've sent them an email thanking them.
Compare that with a company I bought some bathroom fittings from when my parents were refurbing. I had to hand over an email address to organise collection timings.
For no reason whatsoever, they assumed that I must be upgrading every bathroom in the county. Spam arrived several times a day, until their company went bust four years later. No Unsubscribe possible.
At least email spam remains relatively controllable with a variety of tricks and methods. SMS and vocal spam on the other hand. Car dealer networks being particularly annoying.
Top tip: Keep your mates away from your backdoor.
ChurchSuite (church admin sw) has a lovely feature. At the bottom of all emails sent out, there is a link titled FORGET ME. It has the effect of sending another email to an admin with a button that basically nukes that person from the contacts database. Very GDPR compliant. Perhaps the link could be changed to F@@@ OFF AND DIE for those more smarmy emails?
Oh, I've had an entirely new form of spam show up: IN MY LOGFILES. No, I kid you not, I'll paste the thing below. Worse is that it is from the people who are supposed to help you AGAINST that sort of pollution. I sent them a WTF message and got some woolly excuse plus a removal deadline - here too, they apparently need a week. I hope that doesn't match the detection speed of their firewalls..
Anyway, pasted verbatim from Apache's access.log:
205.210.31.31 - - [21/Oct/2022:02:34:52 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 199 "-" "[xxx, a yyy Networks company, searches across the global IPv4 space multiple times per day to identify customers' presences on the Internet. If you would like to be excluded from our scans, please send IP addresses/domains to: <email address>"
Yes, they did that. If this sets through I will soon no longer be able to detect breach attempts in between the marketing messages..
Mercedes does this too. I once had to use a Mercedes (an A200 that the company insisted I use), and five years later I still get updates about changing Terms, despite having informed them repeatedly that I don't have any Merc anymore. Where I live the regulators have a cunning trick to cut down on the number of privacy complaints they handle: the form you have to fill in is so long and (ironically) demands so many personal details that you're more likey to give up than complete the complaint. I too have not yet found the time to complete that obstacle course..
…when some of the darkest and most cynical minds in technology are struggling, I doubt I can shed any light. …but whilst ‘unsubscribe me’ might not win any prizes for literature and passes a basic grammar check , it fails ‘anagram-maticaly’. Rearranging the letters of ‘unsubscribe me’ gives ‘unsub be crimes’ and obviously it can’t let you do something illegal!
When I feel particularly fueled with vengeance, I turn the dial to 11 and just email the DPO of whatever shitty company is harassing me, threatening to the ICO for lack of GDPR compliance.
Usually, follows a prompt reply that my request has been processed.
I like to imagine whoevere is stopping the spam take all their crappy emails, put them in a bag, take the first turn right and fuck right off.