Nov 02 2009
That reminds me
In my rant about spam on my last post, I reminded myself of another spammy issue that I’ve been meaning to write about.
I’ve noticed a growing trend, maybe it’s due to getting closer to the holiday season and what not, but I’ve noticed more and more emails in my Inbox which are little more than spam… no wait, they are spam, but they are spam from companies that I am already affiliated with in some way, or have purchased from in the past, or have some sort of rewards card with or something like that. In some cases the promoted items or services aren’t from companies I’ve dealt with directly, but more a cross-promotion sort of thing.
As with BT, I don’t actually have a phone line with them anymore, but I did a few years ago, and I’m still getting spammy messages from them about upcoming deals on BT home phones and so on. Presumably if I liked the business, I would have stayed with the business, so if I don’t use their services anymore, shouldn’t I not have to put up with them? It’s not just them, either, telecoms companies are pretty bad with the whole spamming thing, probably because there’s so much competition in the field. I’m happy with my provider at the moment, so no, I don’t want your telephone system, I’ll stick with the one I’ve got, thanks.
It’s the same with internet connections, be they broadband, ADSL, or SDSL, the company always thinks that they can trick you into upgrading to a more expensive package. Its sort of insulting, I mean, I’m on a very high downloads per month package as it is, and I don’t go anywhere near my limit most months, so why would they send me emails on an almost weekly basis trying to get me to upgrade.
And yet, one of the most frustrating aspects about all of this is that to get off these mailing lists you have to follow link after link, and they are always tucked in the most out of the way parts of the emails or webpages that you go to, and you often find that they’ve sneakily altered the usual button set-ups, so you have to click on the left button, which is normally the ‘Cancel’ button. Anyway, that’s enough out of me for now, on this topic anyway.