5/8 Help. After buying something from http://Yahoo.com, I got a pop-up
telling me that I got free $50 worth of coupons for Red
Lobster, Chilis', and other restaurants. I figured that it's
from Yahoo so it's probably trustworthy and answered a few
simple questions (Are you a smoker? Do you have diabetes?
Do you like sports? etc). Then a few questions turned into
a 5 minute survey, that then turned into 500 questions on
"Do you want free Newsweek for 3 months? Yes/No"
"Do you want to subscribe to Sports Illustrated? Yes/No"
"Do you want to try Omaha Steak? Yes/No"
So rather than answering 500 questions to get my $50 coupon,
I quit my browser. The next day, I got 10 spams to my
brand new email account. Today, I got 15 spams. Tomorrow,
I'll probably get even more. I can't cancel the list either
because they're all from different companies. What should
I do?
\_ I did an experiment. I simply typed in test email addresses
in the following web sites without giving them any more
information and got the following results:
http://yourgiftcard.com (on average, 3-4 spams a day after a week)
http://offercash.com (on average, 2-3 spams a day after a week)
<DEAD>everygiftcard.com<DEAD> (on average, 4-5 spams a day after a week)
The tests were conducted using separate test Yahoo accounts.
Most of the spams were filtered correctly, while many did go
through (25% by-passed Yahoo's spam filter). So in short,
you just need to be stupid for 5 seconds to receive massive
amounts of spam forever.
\- why dont you put the admin/technical contacts for those
domains on other mailing lists.
\_ or, someone else can just type your email to all 3!
\_ if it's one of the less irreputable companies, there should be
a canspam compliance notice saying why you're getting email.
And it should include an opt-out for the marketer that the
mailings are being on behalf of. And they will have a global
opt-out list that will propagate to the actual senders. |
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