The Eleventh Commandment

Image via Wikipedia

When you do business with a government agency, at just about any level, you surrender a certain amount of privacy. Whatever you give to the agency is likely going to be subject to so-called “sunshine” laws that go by names like “Freedom of Information” or “Freedom of Access.” Recently, some sportsmen [...]

Email Hall of Shame: MySanAntonio.com

It’s Turkey Day and apparently time for another entry in the Email Hall of Shame. Today’s honoree is MySanAntonio.com, the website for the San Antonio Express-News.
My mail reader is setup to not display images by default. As a result, here’s the entire email I saw in my inbox:

Let’s just start by saying “WOW! LOOK [...]

What’s in your wallet? Spam!

In the annals of Bad Marketing Ideas comes this attempt by Capital One to define any mail they choose to send to be transactional mail:
Kevin, a 40-year-old from Sacramento, Calif., likes to keep a tidy inbox. He’s very deliberate about removing himself from mailing lists and anything else that might clog up his e-mail. [...]

Could Spamford be going to jail?

Accused Facebook spammer could face jail time – Facebook, jail, lawsuits, legal – Computerworld
Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California referred Sanford Wallace to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office for criminal proceedings for allegedly violating an injunction that prohibited him from accessing Facebook.

Russians selling spam lists

A Symantec blog post reports that Russian spammers are now selling lists.
Do you have a business and things go wrong?
Order a spam list, everything comes to normal. This is not a mere assertion, we have more than 100 clients, and neither of them is not going to abandon our services and do not pay any [...]

It’s all about….

What does it take to get someone to understand that emailing is about accuracy and permission?
ZoomInfo appears not to get this. Well, I actually think that they do get it, but they just don’t care about it. Getting permission before emailing is bad for business at least as far as I can see [...]

Elsevier shows how not to do it

In October of 2004, I registered with the Lancet in order to gain access to an article. Since that point, Elsevier Ltd., has been sending me email. After their mailing on July 11 of this year, I finally got tired of it, went to their website, and cleared all of the checkboxes. [...]

EmailAppenders are plagiarists too?

It certain looks like EmailAppenders’ “anti-spam policy page” is a verbatim, but unattributed copy of an article by Kirill Popov. Well, except that they took the text and left off the link at the end of the first paragraph.

How not to handle unsubscribes

Laura of Word to the Wise has an excellent post up on How not to handle unsubscribes regarding her experience trying (and failing) to be unsubscribed from Paypal’s lists.
The only thing she left out was this quote:
For example, DMA argued that ‘‘tracking by account information also makes it easier to honor opt-out requests for customers [...]

Why you want to unsubscribe quickly

1-800-Pet-Meds bills itself as “America’s Largest Pet Pharmacy”. And you might expect them to have good privacy policies, too, right?
You’d be wrong.
First off, they seem to have a problem with unsubscribing people from their lists. There’s an article that came across my desk today (courtesy of Google’s news alerts) from The Consumerist:
Saturday, she [...]