Tag: Spam

Let Me Frigging Unsubscribe

George Saines hits on a problem that annoys me to no end when it comes to getting off stupid mailing lists and pseudo-spam from legit companies. As he puts it in the title of his blog post, I Want To Unsubscribe, Not “Manage My Preferences”,

But increasingly, I see emails sent from large, respectable companies [1] that provide me with no unsubscribe link. Instead there is an insidious trend towards “Managing Preferences,” which invariably requires a log in, a brief search to find the unsubscribe option, and a form submit. And after all that am I unsubscribed? Apparently not because I keep getting messages. The companies assure that I’m off XY email list while seemingly putting me on ZQW list simultaneously. Perhaps most irritating of all, I am spending an increasing amount of time browsing and checking email from my phone, and elaborate unsubscribe workflows thwart my ability to quickly opt out.

Something else I really hate and get more of is political spam from affiliates of the two major parties in the United States.

For example, last year all I wanted to do was donate a couple hundred dollars to support gay marriage in California. Apparently doing that was an invitation for every fucking Democratic PAC and Steering Committee in the United States to add me to their mailing lists. Thanks, guys — really makes me want to not donate next time around.

Plaxo: We’ll Spam You Less!

Plaxo didn’t get it in 2004 and its recent announcement that it will scale back its spamming reveals it still doesn’t get it in 2006.

Plaxo earned a light of well-deserved scorn for the way it helped its users keep their contact information updated. Essentially after entering your contacts into Plaxo, the service would spam the contacts periodically with e-mails asking users to update their contact information with Plaxo.

And the big change Plaxo announced in March?

…as of a few weeks ago, you should start seeing fewer and fewer of these e-mails, as we’ve shifted our product functionality away from address book update.

Wow, you mean there wasn’t a market in getting people to spam their friends and co-workers? How shocking.

Anyway, notice that people will start seeing “fewer of these e-mails” not “none of these e-mails.” The relentless spam will march on, just in slightly diminished quantities.

The only good thing that Plaxo ever did was serve as a clueless filter. Aside from e-mailing me about this or that MLM scheme, nothing says “clueless” like “Plaxo user.”

Sources:

A Little Less In Your Inbox. Plaxo’s Personal Card (Plaxo Official Weblog), March 20, 2006.

Plaxo Scales Back Automatic E-Mail Feature. Associated Press, March 23, 2006.

Is This Salon.Com Spam Legitimate?

As long-time readers probably known, I absolutely detest Salon.Com. Still, when I received a spam purporting to be from Salon Media Group asking me to re-up my subscription recently, even I had to do a double-take. Yes they have lousy judgment, poor ethics and a trash tabloid aesthetic, but even Salon.Com’s publishers wouldn’t try to entice me to renew my subscription by offering up previously unpublished Abu Ghraib photos of torture. Would they?

We’re planning to release hundreds more photos taken inside Abu Ghraib. Using information found in a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) report and other sources, our news team is cataloging each image so we may provide captions that offer critical context. Our goal is to publish newsworthy pictures that haven’t been widely seen before, providing the best information that the CID investigation materials could offer.

I’m contacting you and other former Salon Premium members to make sure these photos reach a large audience. Your expired Premium membership supported our ongoing mission to speak truth to power, but we need your help again now.

I’d like to urge you to renew your Premium membership now through this link to give us the support we need to continue this important work:

https://sub.salon.com/dyn/RenewMembership/

Well that is a bit tempting. Hey Salon — how about throwing in an autographed photo of Lyndie England?

Challenge-Response=SPAM

I lurk on a mailing list about e-mail lists, and recently the list has been going back and forth over using challenge/response systems to control SPAM.

In a challenge/response system, typically if you e-mail an individual using such a system, you will get back an automated message which requires you to reply to it in order to prove you are not a spammer. Some systems require complex “challenges” to demonstrate that you are not a spammer.

Personally, I consider all challenge/response e-mails to be just as annoying as spam and tag them as such within my e-mail client. Such e-mails are especially annoying since 99 percent of the the one’s I’ve received have come from people who contacted me first. If someone’s going to e-mail me requesting a response and then not take the time to add me to their white list, it must not really have been as urgent as they claimed in the e-mail.

NRA Spam

Interesting — while ripping on the National Rifle Association’s NRA News site the other day, I mentioned that in order to view the site you have to enter your name and e-mail address but that there is no formal registration system. You have to give the same information every time.

And the morons at the NRA apparently decided that it would be a good idea a) to spam people who are dumb enough (like me) to use their real e-mail address, and b) not to eliminate duplicate addresses if you visited the site on more than one occasion.

So this evening I received not one, but two spam messages from the NRA basically apologizing for some sort of technical problem they had earlier. Earth to NRA: your real problem is your complete cluelessness.

Spam Problem (Mostly) Solved

A few weeks ago I was whining that I was to the point of pretty much ignoring my e-mail because of the inundation of spam. Earlier this year it got to the point where I was receiving 400-500 spam per day on some days, and the filtering I was doing was not proving effective (far too many spams were still getting through).

A combination of Seth adding server-side spam filtering with Spam Assassin and upgrading to the latest build of Mozilla Thunderbird has largely solved that problem for now.

I’m only seeing 8 or 9 spam in my inbox each day now, with almost no false positives.

Still, I’d like to see some of these spammers get the Michael Fay treatment someday.