If you have a business and you want to promote it and make people give you shitloads of money, spamming them is not a good idea. Even worse, as some companies have started doing, is to send them text messages with your latest, “very exciting” news: that you have stuff you are “passionate” about, and want to sell it to people.
Even HSBC is now doing this. It sends me into an apoplectic rage and I immediately call them up, saying “Take me off your mailing list NOW” forgetting that it’s not email and they probably won’t know who I am. But oh, it feels good.
Then there are the emails - one Italian restaurant in the Sheraton even had the nerve to call me “old friend” in its gushing and irritating sales letter. Delete, report as spam but not before replying “Take me off your mailing list NOW!!!!!”
Sometimes they write back to say sorry, like this restaurant called SEVVA. That’s right!
“Dear Ms. (my name, spelled wrongly)
Warm Greetings from SEVVA!
Thank you for your email. As per your request, we have taken your contact detail off from our mailing list.
We do hope that we can stay in touch and looking forward to serve you and your guests at SEVVA in the near future. Should you require for reservations or private event arrangement please feel free to contact me.
We appreciate for your continuous support. Look forward to welcoming you and your guests at SEVVA soon.
Best Regards ”
“Stay in touch”? Are they insane? I wonder what it is about “Go to hell, damned spammer” they don’t understand. SEVVA??? Just the name is enough to keep me away in droves. What will they think of next? Turn up at your house, probably, like mormons.
I’ve started giving fake mobile numbers and emails in those forms you need to fill in for everything. obviously fake, like 12345678 and abc@abc.com
The worst is having a netvigator email account. About 50% of the emails I receive on that account is spam. And if you want to install a filter they have the cheek to want to charge you extra for it. That’s why companies like google with gmail prosper and PCCW fails…
Smart! I’ll do that too. Yeah Netvigator is a joke. I think for me the spam ratio on that is 75% …
PCCW deserves to fail! I hate everything about them. I’ve tried for 8 years to have my phone bill sent to my new address for example. Impossible.
Just some friendly information from your local IT business guru:
Whenever you send an email requesting to be removed from a mailing list, you are quite obviously confirming that it is a valid, monitored address (something of value). By so doing, you are not only asking to be removed from -their- mailing list, but to be added to the list of known good addresses that every large IT-driven sales corp sells/shares with their “trusted partners”/”close associates.” This is perfectly legal, at least in the U.S., and often carefully written out in Lawyerese in the site’s EULAs that no one ever reads.
Long story short: you actually end up getting even MORE spam by requesting to be removed. The only way to avoid spam is by registering with a spam address.