At this time, every business I’ve ever done business with, or organization I belong to, is flooding my inbox with e-mails. I’m getting daily e-mails from Air Canada, an organization I belong to based in Toronto, my bank, my professional association, my undergraduate university (and since it is a federated university, from my college too), my graduate university, my rare bookseller, and even my arborist. Yes, I actually have an arborist, who looks after my trees, and she is e-mailing me once or twice a week. It’s a mass e-mail, as are most of what I receive.
Look, folks, I get it. You’re trying to stay in business, and you’re trying to tell us that you’re still there. That’s fine. But stop reminding me that you’re still there. I know you’re there; and I’ll call upon you when necessary. But until then–stop sending me mass e-mails!
Anybody else sick of the crap that has flooded our inboxes since this crisis started?
Oh, god yes. Everything I’ve ever done from my dog groomer to my insurance company.
One outfit I’ve never bought anything from (but I did go on their website once) sends me 3 emails everyday. I’ve done everything to unsubscribe. Hasn’t worked yet.
Those aren’t the problem, since they use a single address for distribution. I can easily assign that addr to automatically go to my spam folder and never get bothered again.
The ones that are a problem are the perpetual spammers who use a different address each time, often creating new ones for one-time use several times per day. Hard to filter those, which is why the spammers do it.
I got an email from my doctors’ office, where I haven’t been in quite some time. I had to log in to my account to even see the message, and then it was the same old “we’re there for you in these difficult times” shit. Since then I’ve gotten a few more. I hope they don’t want to tell me anything important, because I’m deleting those now.
Every email will have an unsubscribe link. The extra second it takes to unsubscribe is worth the hassle. If I get an unwanted email, I unsubscribe and never have to be bothered by that company again.
What I don’t understand is why, when you click an unsubscribe link, it tells you that it could take up to two weeks to take effect. It sure didn’t take two weeks before you started spamming me with email.
And I swear that no matter how many “don’t send me email” checkboxes there are on a company’s web page, you still wind up getting a ton of spam anyway.
I teach at a community college. The college’s faculty directory contains a disclaimer that the directory may not be used for soliciting commercial purposes. Apparently, textbook publishers, online homework providers, and so on, think this disclaimer does not apply to them. I get unsolicited emails from these companies all the time, and in the spirit of this thread, they’ve been been ramping up lately.
Most of these emails provide an unsubscribe button or link. But with many of these, I wind up hearing from them again after a few months have elapsed. I assume they are just farming the college directory again. Once I start to recognize repeats, their entire domain gets plonked.
I would say about one in five do not provide a way to unsubscribe. With these, I reply with a curt “remove me from any email lists you have put me on, immediately.” Sometimes I get a “we’re so sorry” response and they comply. Those that don’t get their entire domain plonked.
As an aside, the thing that really makes me stabby about these emails is when they include something like “you are receiving this message because you signed up to receive blah blah blah from us.” That’s an outright lie. YOU signed me up, against my will and without my permission!
I use Yahoo and mail.com for email, and they are both pretty good about spam. If there’s no unsubscribe link, it goes into spam. If there is, I unsubscribe and then spam.
One advantage of not working was that I had time to go through the ymail account (bills, business, shopping, newsletters, etc.) and get rid of all unread messages in the inbox, delete the ones I don’t want to keep, and unsubscribe to those I was no longer interested in. There are still many unread emails sorted into relevant folders, but I know what they are now and can actually look at every email that comes in.
The ones with “in these troubled times” and “now more than ever” in the subject lines are immediately deleted.
Companies that I have shopped from are immediately deleted, but I don’t unsubscribe in case I want to shop in the future. Bed, Bath, and Beyond and clothing stores are the ones I don’t spam.
How do I know that the unsubscribe link isn’t actually a virus-enter-here link? In fact, I assume that most of them from unknown sources are and I never click on them.
I mean like…emails from places you’ve shopped, companies you’ve created an account with for one reason or another (like Air Canada)…there’s a lot of legit companies out there sending legit email blasts using legit services. Unless you’ve got a really crappy email provide, you probably don’t even see the ones that aren’t legit, they go right to your spam box.
Tons and tons and tons of money and manpower goes in to fighting spam. And tons goes in to real email marketing to make sure emails get to you and are following all of the laws (and there are many laws).
At this point you really need to start paying attention to the differences between potentially harmful spam and merely unwanted junk mail. Like, don’t click on anything, including “unsubscribe” for “P3niS P1lls T0Day!!!” but you know, if something comes from marketing@bestbuy.com then just click the damn unsubscribe link already.
Imagine if you could turn off the tap of all the ads you get in your home mailbox. Let the local window installer know you really don’t want new windows instead of just throwing that damn flyer away every week. Well, those same kinds of companies are sending those same kinds of flyers to your email inbox, with a government-mandated link to get them to stop. So just click to stop.
In addition, I have always wondered if the “unsubscribe” link is a way for them to identify your email address as a live one, which is worth more for selling.