Let’s say I sign up for an advertising/commission service (Commission Junction) on the Internet, and through them I receive marketing e-mails from a variety of advertisers.
Now let’s say I cancel with the service, and one of the advertisers (Pugster) continues to send me marketing e-mails.
I “could” set my spam filter in Outlook to delete e-mails from that advertiser, but my question is about the compliance they have to follow when sending these e-mails.
I used to work for a company which did online e-commerce, and we had to follow certain rules, one of them about marketing e-mails. Apparently, when sending a marketing e-mail to an e-mail list, you have to:
Give an unsubscribe link or unsubscribe instructions
Give a legitimate physical address
Give a legitimate phone number
I’m sure there are other rules we had to follow, but those were the ones I had to look out for when reviewing e-mails we were about to send to a customer.
These e-mails I get from Pugster don’t follow any of these rules. No unsubscribe link or instructions, no physical address, no phone number. They do list an e-mail address in it, but I have sent several unsubscribe requests to that address to no avail. I went to Google and looked up the company’s info; the phone number listed is 800-555-1212, and another “voice” number is a fax.
I contacted Commission Junction and asked them to have Pugster stop, and they said this is happening outside of their “domain” so they have no control over it.
Who can I contact to bring legal repercussions to this company who is apparently violating a number of laws, and causing me grief at the same time?
You can lodge a complaint with the FTC, but is looks unlikely that you will see any action taken. To further complicate matters, it appears that you may have consented to receiving the emails based on some boilerplate when you signed up with Commission Junction. When you have a business relationship with a company, as far as I understand it, emails are no longer non-solicitated spam.
As far as civial suits go, it seems very unlikely that you could win a monetary judgment. After all, what does spam really cost any of us?
The lesson learned here is to have more than one email address. Gmail, Yahoo and the like make it easy to have a dozen throwaway addresses.
But don’t I have to have a mechanism to remove myself from an automated e-mail list? Even if it’s not unsolicited spam, it’s still spam.
And doesn’t the boilerplate agreement with CJ expire when my relationship with CJ expires? Shouldn’t this company stop sending me e-mails?
Also, if I’ve used a communication method listed in the automated e-mails Pugster is sending me (in this case, an e-mail address), haven’t I done my part of notifying them that I no longer wish to be included in their e-mails?
I’m not after money for me, I’m after something painful for them, so that they stop doing these kinds of things to people. They have to give me a way to opt out of the e-mail; they are intentionally making it impossible to opt out.
I actually have a bunch of e-mail addresses with a bunch of domains (not just gmail and yahoo, but several I own myself). The problem is, throwaway e-mail addresses don’t work the way you think they do, unless you literally make a separate e-mail address for every account you sign up for anywhere on the Internet. Then you are juggling dozens of throwaway e-mail addresses just to stop the possibility that you might get 5 e-mails a month from someone? Seems like too much work.
Since Pugster is (AFAI can tell) breaking the law by not giving me an opt out, I want to improve quality of life for everyone, not just me. I want to somehow have the FTC (or whoever enforces the spam laws) enforce it on them.