Here’s an example of how not to do bulk emails.
Consumer Alerts
This email has been sent to the following email address: xx@xxxxxx.xx.xxYou 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.
It’s Broken have recently blogged about the same thing (in more general terms).
Thanks for your comment at IT’S BROKEN, Paul!
Maybe with enough bloggers complaining about this problem, organizations will finally start to pay attention and fix their broken opt-out systems.
Like you I get loads of spam e-mails telling me that I have registered with creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk. I have no recollection of doing so & having typed in creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk. to my browser bar it cannot find a match. Therefore I assume that creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk. is an entirely fictitious website for a compay that specialises in finding e-mail addresses to sell on to unsuspecting but often bogus retailers. Scammers scamming scammers so to speak.
I’ve often thought that the solution to spam would be an option that automatically returns an email to the spammer saying “Your e-mail to xxxxxxx@xxxxxx.co.uk has been identified as spam and was deleted without being opened” If spammers received only half the number of e-mails telling them this in response to the messages they send out, I’m sure they’d soon trim their lists.
Of course, if anyone can give me a real address for creditcrunchfixsurvey.co.uk. so that I can keep bombarding them with e-mails telling them to remove my contact details from their database, I’d be only too happy to do so.
I purchased campaign email software yesterday. I am very pleased with both products. They are much better than other mailing software.
My trouble comes when I want some emails from a company (Here’s your reciept, Mr Purchaser) and not others (You know that thing you bought for your uncle last month? Well that probably means you want to buy these things too!).
Every major online retailer seems to do this by default.
Spam is not unwanted mail, it is unsolicited commercial mail. Wikipedia simply calls it unsolicited bulk email but it is important to draw a line.
Email newsletter software
Free Press – pitches. Think about an interesting angle that a reporter might want to cover prior to the event.
Best Email Marketing Software
The Email marketing possesses a tool which is referred to as “autoresponder” and it is similar to “autopilot” used for campaigns. After someone has registered on your newsletter, you can deliver a message for the campaign on fussy days. Now you just need to create messages and plan the release from the autoresponder. When these messages are released by the autoresponder they will be automatically delivered to the subscribers on your list.
email delivery