It has happened to all of us. You open your inbox to be deluged by junk. Instead of reading relevant email from business correspondents, good friends and family, your email has been sold to the highest bidder to see if you need a new mortgage or a new bounce in your sex life. Thanks to SPAM filters and the like, this intrusion to our email has been throttled back to a dull roar. At least it is manageable and not overly annoying.
However, there is a new type of junk mail that is far more insidious, and frankly a lot more annoying. There appears to be a wave of emails from the legitimate companies that won’t allow you to unsubscribe to their spam. Sometimes, they tell you that you have to wait 5-7 days, but even after their grace period, they still keep on delivering their emails with weekly if not daily too-good-to-be-true offers.
In all instances, I signed up for these mailings. I just made the assumption that I would always have the option to unsubscribe if I did not find the content relevant. It seems that the following companies are ignoring their unsubscribe requests all together, and we all should be aware.
Target. I can’t remember when or where, but I do remember that I once purchased something from their web site. And then one day, I started getting weekly emails from Target. I unsubscribed and the opposite happened. Rather than weekly, Target decided to start sending to me daily. So every day, I would hit unsubscribe and nothing happened. The frequency has dropped dramatically since the holiday season has passed, but I just got another one the other day. In fact, Target was the tipping point prompting me to write this post.
Microsoft. Can you believe it? The king of the software companies, and one of the most valuable companies in the world ignore their Unsubscribe requests. It is indeed frustrating. If they are going to ignore their unsubscribe requests, what good would an email do? Or a complaint to their help desk? So all I can do is to call them out.
Blue Hornet. Most people have not heard of this company but Blue Hornet is the largest email blast company in the world. In fact, at one point, PC Pitstop used Blue Hornet to distribute our newsletter. That’s the reason that I am on their mailing list. Since they are handling so many email blasts, they had to ensure that we and all of their other customers were not spamming and of course respecting our unsubscribe requests. I find it rich that Blue Hornet’s unsubscribe link is broken.
Conclusion. Target, Microsoft, and Blue Hornet are just the ones that I can easily recall, but there are lots more offenders and almost all of them are household names. I love email and the internet, but this is a bad trend that the large companies ignore the voice of their customers. So I thought I would post this and encourage everyone to share their experiences below.
