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Five email tics I'd love for you to lose

Submitted by Merlin on November 7, 2005 - 7:05am.

For the love of God, people; can we get the word out on these? Format courtesy of my other site.

  1. The liberal use of the “VERY HIGH PRIORITY!!!“ flag
  2. The 18-line sig about all the Bad Things that will happen to me if I ever reveal the contents of your privileged, confidential (and unencrypted) message
  3. The unrequested press release (and the serial ignoring of the “Unsubscribe” I sent you for the previous seven press releases)
  4. The graphical background, font and table tags, and remaining 14k of HTML cruft associated with every. single. message. you’ve ever sent
  5. The including of my – plus 98 other strangers’ – personal email addresses in the “To:” line of your friendly reminder about Tyler’s birthday party

Friend: I love you, but you must evolve.

in

Re: serial unsolicited commercial emails...

Submitted by Craig Hughes (not verified) on November 7, 2005 - 8:06am.

Re: serial unsolicited commercial emails after unsubscribe requests

Do you by any change run any computer (say, a DSL router or wifi AP) which permits users to connect to the internet, for example to read their email? If so, I’d say you’re an Internet Access Service Provider under the definition in CAN-SPAM, and you can certainly feel free to let the spammer who refuses to unsubscribe you from their list know that. And cc the corporate counsel and/or CEO on your next unsubscribe notice. Be sure to point out that once you’ve notified them not to send you any more unsolicited commercial emails, that if they do so again, that’s clearly willful violation of the law exposing them to treble damages. This strategy has worked great for me in the past. Sometimes it’s tricky to track down the general counsel, but often it’s pretty straightforward.