Never fails. Buy one item from an online retailer and you’re on their Spam list forever. It’s reached a point where I think long and hard before opening another account. For example, there was a purchase I considered making through Home Depot. The item is only available online. Order online and pickup at the store. Then I thought about the Spam. :smack: Didn’t order. This is why I have never created a Home Depot account.
My most common spammers. I’ve bought online from all of them.
AT&T they are one of the worst.
Amazon
Best Buy
Duluth Trading
Dickies
Office Depot.
Sheet Music Plus
This is comparable to a brick and mortar store tracking down a customer’s address and mailing ads But with them we have the option to refuse to give out an email address…
Should we be inundated with Spam for buying from an online retailer? Is that our reward for buying from them?
Do you ever try to unsubscribe from their emails? Seems a lot easier than avoiding shopping at a place that has what you need.
I unsubscribe from emails all the time. If they are legit businesses they are not sending spam, and you can unsubscribe with ease. It’s the not-legit businesses that are the one sending spams. Companies you have no prior business with and stuff.
This is also what one-time emails are for. Use one of them when you fill out the form, and let them spam it all they want.
Also, most such merchants have a spot where you agree to receive such promotional emails from them – uncheck it, and you won’t get this spam. (True, it’s often a rather hidden option. Bit if this bothers you, it’s worth looking for.)
Also, most sellers have a “checkout as guest” option, where you don’t have to create an account. (And if they don’t, another website selling the same products does – buy from them.) You have the extra work of entering your shipping address & payment info each time, but that may be worthwhile if spam really bothers you.
I write a great many recommendation letters. Most schools ignore them, some send me a thank you letter, occasionally I get a blanket or a t-shirt. One school put me on a freaking mailing list. Annoys me to no end.
A month ago, I ordered a weather station from a company called Accu-Rite. I have no complaint about the item, but I will never again order from Accu-Rite. It is not that they inundate my email box, but every time I google or sign on to TSD or similar, I get one or more of their ads, often flashing.
Question: does this behavior actually increase their sales? I find it hard to believe. They asked me to rate the product, which I was willing to, if only to register the above complaint. But to do so, I would have had to create an online account with them. Do they think I’m nuts?
Let me ask this - are you more likely to respond to their ad about something you are at least somewhat interested in or an ad for a product you wouldn’t buy in the life of the universe?
We’ve investigated buying Google ads for our conference. One thing you can do is to see how many hits you’d get for various keywords. The results were not quite in line with my expectations - one search term had 100x more hits than any others.
Anyhow, clearly this works or Google wouldn’t be making so much money.
I’ve just finally had time to unsubscribe, and it is easy. The page you get to says it might take a week to have it take effect, we’ll see.
But I use Constant Contact, and it automatically adjusts your mailing list to remove unsubscribe requests. There are ways of getting around it, obviously, but legitimate businesses are likely to accept them. Real spam on the other hand.
I do uncheck the send me mail box when I order on line, but it never seems to do me any good.
Legitimate businesses will allow you to unsubscribe. A place like Home Depot does not want to make its customers mad.
If I get emails from a business, I filter them, but if I get tired, I just follow the unsubscribe instructions and it’s fine.
They used to say not to do that, since it tells spammers your address is good, but they have other ways of finding that out, and, again, legitimate companies will do as you ask.
You can also (with Gmail anyway) flag a message as spam. In which case, Google will ask if you want them to attempt to unsubscribe you and also send future mailings into the spam folder.
One year, after a bunch of online Christmas shopping, I was flooded with daily spam mails from all number of places: Kohl’s, Lacomme, Target, etc. After a few weeks of irritatedly deleting them, it finally dawned on me to just click unsubscribe on each. Which worked really well and I was quickly back to being pretty much unfiltered spam free.
I checked a couple emails from Best Buy and Duluth. Don’t see an unsubscribe option. Last resort, I’ll flag them as spam. But then I won’t see my order invoices unless I check the spam folder.
Thank you for your responses. I know what can be done now
Except for a rare few I almost always unsubscribe. Also, by law (at least in the USA), you must include an unsubscribe link in your promotional emails. If you are receiving legitimate emails from Home Depot, Duluth, and the like, I can guarantee that at the bottom of the email there will be an unsubscribe link, albeit in fine text. Only real true-blue spam, which is illegal to start with, ignores this law. Any legitimate company honors its unsubscribe link due to the law.
I phrase it this way because you can indeed receive real spam made to look like a legitimate company’s email. But I’ve never seen any fake promos for retail businesses, only banks and shipping companies.
My mom was wondering how to get rid of UCE and insisted that it was businesses she actually had dealt with and had tried the unsubscribe button. I showed her where her spam button was and that she should try the unsubscribe for email she absolutely knew was from a legitimate business she had dealt with before and that if that didn’t work she should feel free to use the spam button.