I found a local instructor for a class I’d like to take. She added me to her email list, so I would get all of the info on dates, times, workshops, etc. I was a little peeved that she just used the TO field, instead of BCC, but no biggie, right? Just the other day, I (and many other people) received an email from someone affiliated with a state association of instructors for her field detailing information on an upcoming workshop. The email specifically stated “[Instructor] has graciously let me forward our club workshop information to you!”
So I emailed the instructor and said “Please remove me from your email list. And don’t EVER give it out again!!”
So I get an email back saying she’s never given out anyone’s email information. And that she prefers to remove RUDE people from her list anyway.
I reply asking how this other person got my info other than from her, and she said I must’ve signed up for their email list.
Nope, says I - just yours!
She said there must have been a mix-up.
Mix-up? Like you accidentally gave out other peoples’ email addresses without permission?
Now I’m harassing her and my life must suck for me to have to take this out on her.
So, who’s the* asshole here?
*Bigger? 'Cause I know it’s really not a huge deal, but it’s the principle of the matter, dammit!
work corporate address
home address for friends, relatives, net shopping etc
primary gmail address for net registrations, notices, net dating
secondary gmail address for things that require plausible deniability
You’re definitely both being assholes. I’ve always been baffled by people who are abrasive in situations where there’s no reasonable expectation that it will help the situation; or people who continue communicating when there’s no clear reason to. I can be quite abrasive when, in my best judgment, the best way to get what I need is to be abrasive. But it’s rare.
Honestly why would you even write back after she said she’s taking you off her list?
If I understand you correctly, you know you’re both assholes here and just want the satisfaction of being told she’s the bigger one? Yeah, I will say it – she’s the bigger asshole to give out your email and lie about it. Mark her email address as spam and let gmail do what it does best and avoid her for you.
I have a personal hatred of assholes who don’t understand how to use BCC, or who use reply to all*. I think those people should be banned from ever touching a computer.
*yes, there is a very small set of situations in which reply to all is a useful tool, but those are few and far between
I would say that it strikes me as unprofessional, and borderline unethical, for an instructor to give out class lists (or even potential class lists) to solicitors. So I can understand why the OP might give a forceful reply in this case… although I would consider it an absolute necessity to include in that reply a copy of the offending email in full, and a detailed explanation of what happened, so it was clear that I wasn’t making an unfounded accusation.
Giving the instructor the greatest benefit of any possible doubt, one could certainly assume that her intentions were innocent (“if they’re interested in my class, they might be interested in this as well”). But if so, all the more reason to hope that some good might be accomplished by firmly, but not obnoxiously, setting her straight.
Combination of idiot and thin-skinned parties meeting.
She shouldn’t have put your name on the TO list, but she sounds like a computer idiot.
You should have seen that coming, probably figured out your name was simply plucked from the list and you should have contacted that second person and tell them to drop your name from future mailings.
She sounds like the typical AOL idiots who seem to feel the need to forward every single piece of email they ever receive to every single person they know. First clue is when you see the Re: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd; Fwd
Then you scroll down 43 miles of forwarded text to find some stupid picture of a kitten playing with yarn.
There’s a huge difference between being assertive and being abrasive. I wouldn’t have given her the benefit of the doubt. I would have anticipated that being a dick in the e-mail would result in an unsatisfying result.
I wouldn’t particularly be bothered by receiving information for another workshop that may interest me - from an academic organization, it’s actually something that I expect! I’m a student, and I receive emails to my school account all the time about things happening on/around campus, in the department, and about future course offerings, etc, and I’ve found that useful to have. I’ve even received emails from a prof who got my name from another prof and they thought I’d be interested in the item in the email…and I was! I don’t consider my email address to be something that needs to be kept private at all times from all sources (which is why I choose which of my 3 to give, depending on the circumstances).
Given that, I’d say you were the biggest asshole in this situation.
I can understand that you didn’t like your email being shared, and I can understand (to a lesser extent) your dislike of the “To:” field, but you never even gave the chance for the instructor to explain the situation (it might be very common or even expected by her employer for her to help promote other classes/workshops). You jumped down her throat about it; you were overly aggressive and, yes, rude. A two sentence email, very bluntly writen, the capitalized “EVER” and the multiple exclamation marks; from your OP, you didn’t even tell her why you were upset. Basically, you escalated things right off the bat, and then got bitchy when called on your rudeness.
Sure she lied after, but that doesn’t excuse your disproportionate first email, because at that time, you had no information about *why *your email address was shared.
She loses you as a client and she loses the money, but you’ve lost an educational experience and other opportunies simply because, despite your heirarchy of emails, you consider them all to be sacred.
What perplexes me the most is why you would overreact to an email from an affiliated person about something you’ve expressed interest in. It hardly seems like you had any reason to suspect that it would abused, and chances are a good portion of the list would have been interested in it.
I really can’t see what you think you’ve gained by blowing this out of proportion.
Agree with every point here. So your email addy is out to another organization. Big fucking deal. Get over it. Jesus, it’s not the end of the fucking world. Unless someone acts aggressively negative or deliberately hostile to me first, thus showing me true deliberate asshole intentions, I always give people the benefit of the doubt.
What’s the point of this life if we can’t cut people some slack in the simplest of circumstances? Treat others as you’d like to be treated and all of that; I’d want people to cut me slack if I made a boneheaded maneuver like that, I’d want people to cut my mom, my dad, my sister, my daughter, my brother slack, and not get all bent out of shape about it. I never understand people who get all hostile and aggressive over something that, at the end of the day, just doesn’t matter.
Avarie537, you seem to be pretty smart when it comes to that email thing but did you also know that there is a function that allows you to delete emails without having to read them?
It’s true!
What I do when I get emails from senders I don’t recognize -sometimes referred to as “Spam” -and nobody’s 100% sure how it got *that *name!- I click on a little box beside the email–mind you, you can do this without actually opening and reading the message–and then I click on “Delete” and it’s gone!
Normally when I do this it takes me less than two seconds.
Now if we more closely examine your technique replete with confrontational stance and spoiling for a desire to one-up a potential instructor as well as the subsequent snark rebuttals - this more dubious solution had to have taken x>2 seconds.
In your attempt to divine your specific A.H. ranking in what I’m sure is a ceaseless quest, I declare you the official winner.
Yes, that particular message is gone, but that’s not the point.
I would venture you haven’t had so much spam that it messed up your e-mail account.
The e-mail addy has been given to someone with whom he has no relationship, and with whom there is no agreement as to not passing it on or even selling it to others. There is increased exposure of the addy being harvested by spammers. I’m sure the chances are small, but they’re significantly greater than they were before. The potential consequences are not insignificant, and the whole thing was easily avoidable with a modicum of sense.
Deleting one e-mail is not a problem. But should the addy work its way into the wrong hands, dealing with hundreds of them certainly could be.
What he said. I get a lot of legitimate emails every day. Now, a lot of them are from people I know, but a lot more are from people I don’t know, but who have a legit reason to contact me. And, of course, I get my share, and sometimes more than my share, of spam.
There’s been a couple of times when I’ve had to abandon email addresses because I got on a spammer’s list, and I know that this happens to other people, too. When the number of spam emails is greater than the number of emails from people I really want to talk to, then it’s time to get a new email address. If I have to check almost every email out (some are obviously spam from their titles, but not all) to determine whether it’s spam or not, it could take another half hour to an hour each day, especially if my connection or the email site is not playing nicely with me.
This would have played out if you’d emailed something like this:
Dear Person,
Just wanted to let you know I was a bit surprised to receive an email from Otherperson, which said you had given him/her our email addresses. If that was the case, could I kindly ask that you don’t provide my email address to other people in future?
It’s not being an asshole to object to being put on yet another spam list, but…
The instructor probably had, and has, not a clue in the world on how spamming works. She likely still doesn’t know how you got on the organization’s list, which is why she was so huffy when you objected. You could have been more tactful, but I doubt it would have helped.
“Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity”, although I grant you that in the further reaches, they are hard to distinguish.
Also, people are tossing around the word ‘spam,’ and I think that word does not mean what either you all or I think it means.
Spam is bot-generated, unsolicited e-mail trying to get me to click on links for products I have no interest in (or can even figure out what they are).
Unsolicited e-mail from relevant professionals and/or organizations are actually sometimes relevant and certainly don’t count as spam. If a person says “I got your e-mail from so-and-so, who thought you might be interested in our related workshops,” well, that’s not spam in my book. A simple, “thanks, but I’m not interested in updates from your group,” is likely to be all it takes to rectify the problem.
Spam is unsolicited commercial email. If someone gets a mailing list from someone else, and sends out commercial email (and email about a workshop is commercial), then that’s spam. It’s unsolicited, it’s commercial, and the OP certainly didn’t sign up for it.
Spam is not limited to multiple batches of email, pushing questionable sexual aids, though that’s certainly a large segment of it.
We must fight spam wherever and however we can. We must make it clear to those who allow others to use their email lists that this is not acceptable.
