Late night email rant Mark 1 - this should be illegal
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Director at Commercial Reality Ltd
23 June 2004 23:24pm
I'm not the first in the world to have this problem but today I have (so far) received around 36, sorry make that 37 now, emails from the same damn system all reminding me to register for an event not far from Oxford that I don't wish to go to. Some stupid system and/or operator glitch no doubt.
But get this - in the small print at the bottom it says I can de-list my name by sending an email containing the words "unsubscribe venture_fest list" in the body of the email (not the header).
So I did.
I replied to the email, included the email that was sent to me (which included these magic removal words) and thought that would be the end of it.
Not a bit of it. Some moronic parsing system sent me an unintelligible email back effectively saying it couldn't understand my request. Well I couldn't understand it either. I bet you can't too:
Okay, so I'm in a ranting mood right now, but for goodness sake can't these email houses work like the professional autoresponders do and simply include a hyperlink that you click on to get removed from a list?
This problem is growing.
Many people like me have multiple email addresses yet tend to work from one email client (Outlook in my case). This means that you get email sent to one address but often appear to reply fromanother. Reply to a list server that isn't smart and it won't recognise you: a different email address means a different person.
You CAN reconfigure Outlook and change your apparent address to unsubscribe from a particular list but this is tedious and why the heck should you? It also means you can unwittingly start sending out a private email address to people you would rather keep it from if you forget that you've temporarily reconfigured things.
The solution is simply to include an encoded unsubscribe hyperlink in your email. I use them all the time in my own FactsAboutAdSense emailing lists and if someone decides to get off my list, it's just one click for them and they're gone. No hard feelings either way.
There. Rant over.
38, 39, 40, 41....
By the way, you can configure Outlook to delete this type of junk message automatically - go to the Organize tab and hit the Junk-mail link and go from there.
I'm going to tackle this one at source by phone tomorrow. I know where they live.
Partner at Philip Atherton
24 June 2004 00:54am
William, the Outlook spam application only goes so far in dealing with this situation and if you reply, some spammers use this as verification of a valid address and sell it on!
In your case, it sounds like a legitimate abuse of batch handling invitations, but if you also get other rubbish you might want to consider something like Cloudmark.
Without wishing to sound like an advertisement, this solution not only takes the email address but scans the whole surface image, electronically watermarks it with a unique ID, and stores it in the Cloudmark database. From then on any further mail is put in a Spam folder in your Outlook programme.
It is one of the great collaborative computing success stories. Most of the time the application will pick up spam without you doing anything. They now reckon to capture about 80% of the rubbish circulating at any given time, around the world. Over one million people use it. Blocking is therefore personal but also based on the activity of the million customers. There may also be some Spam address harvesting going on, but can't be sure.
You can also unblock. If you find commercial email in your Spam folder that you want to receive, then 'unblock' and the email along with future ones will go to the inbox or wherever you want it routed.
The watermark identity is a neat solution because auto-addressers disguise (change) the address in order to get through. That's where Microsoft's solution tends to fall down. The full scan is a way of identifying the same format and presentation. For spammers, the only solution is to generate a whole new look and new wording plus a new alias address.
In practice, I tend to push the ’block’ button twice maybe three times a week which is nothing these days when you consider I reckon on 60-110 unsolicited emails a week. They get the address from one of my web sites.
Hope this helps. The cost is about £29 if I remember rightly.
Philip Atherton