Here’s an example of how not to do bulk emails.

Consumer Alerts send out marketing messages with the following standard text always included at the end of the message body, customised to the user:

This email has been sent to the following email address: xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx

You are receiving this email because you have registered with creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk. creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk respects your privacy and only sends emails to registered members. Our emails are never sent unsolicited.

If you wish to unsubscribe from our future special offers click here.

http://consumer-alerts.co.uk/public/unsubscribe.jsp?gid=some_randomised_string

Please note that unsubscribe requests must be made from the email account used to register with creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk: xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx

To find out more about us and our privacy policy.

http://consumer-alerts.co.uk/re?l=some_other_randomised_string

The unsubscribe link does nothing. The page visited appears to ask a question:

Confirm Unsubscription

Are you sure you would like to unsubscribe from the Group(s):

Consumer Alerts (mailto:info@consumer-alerts.co.uk)

with the following email-address: xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx?

We will send you a confirmation mail of this unsubscription. If you wish to re-subscribe, please reply to this email.

But there is still no mechanism by which you can actually confirm you wish to unsubscribe. Given the wording it looks like there should be a pair of [OK] and [Cancel] buttons but there aren’t. And sure enough, no confirmation email ever appears either.

OK, let’s try visitng their privacy policy page:

No such host.

Thinking laterally and going straight to http://consumer-alerts.co.uk gives no clues about how to unsubscribe either.

OK, a last-ditch attempt. This almost certainly won’t work (if they don’t care about letting people manage the emails they receive from them, how likely is it that they’ll reply to a manual request?):

Please remove xx@xxxxxx.xx.xx from all mailing lists you operate. I have tried to unsubscribe by following the links in the emails but they do not work.

After removing my email address, you should probably fix this problem.

Regards,
Paul

Update 22/09/10:

There is a submit button on the unsubscribe confirmation page, stuck out of sight at the extreme right of the page. I only noticed by looking at the source:

<div class=”submit-row”>

    <button name=”unsubscribe” type=”Submit”>- YES -</button>

</div>

Moral: If you do not provide an unsubscribe facility, or make it hard to find/use, then previously-solicited email that you no longer want very quickly becomes unsolicited. Thus, consumer-alerts.co.uk are spammers.