Some idiot purchased a Dodge Ram truck and used my email address on the purchase documents.
Or, even more believably, some idiot at Dodge copied it down wrong.
So now I get spammed by these people, and the people they sell the addresses to, and “surveys of Ram quality”, and Sirus XM activation notices, and none of the unsubscribe links work.
I called them on the phone, and after a lengthy IVR monologue, they put me on hold for a half hour, after which I gave up.
#Do not buy Dodge Ram Products Unless You Love Unstoppable Spam
I’ve had a similar experience with a BMW dealership once, though I thankfully was able to get off the lists once I threatened to go directly to their ISP’s abuse department.
I’m not trusting some random spammer’s 40-100 odd domains just to allow an unsubscribe link to work. I shouldn’t even have to allow any domain to run scripting if I want to be unsubscribed from noxious waste. So I bypass that problem where they can shove cookies onto my browser and track me harder.
Web forms work just fine without client-side scripting. Don’t be lazy. Process your own C&D code. I’ve given you too much of my attention already. I refuse to give you access to my computing resources.
I’ve nearly been phished with unsubscribe links from spammers pretending to be places I actually do use.
My general rule online is “Fuck you, prove that whatever code you want to run on my machine isn’t going to hurt me.”
The only people my rule harms are people who aren’t me and also send me spam.
Spam isn’t valuable. And in fact, I relish punishing spammers. So they can keep attempting to spam me throughout the eons, and I’ll just laugh. Because their advertising technique isn’t valuable to anyone who matters. Let the spammers waste whatever minuscule cost they have per email on my filter. I simply don’t care if it hurts them.
Well yeah but I wasn’t referring to raw spam, that’s 99.9% handled by my GMail spam folder.
Most of the unsubscribe links I use are from companies, services, or products that I have heard of and/or had some tiny form of interaction with at some point.
More specifically, these people got the address wrong so they thought poor ol’ @Medievalist was an actual customer.
Being a customer, or the company thinking you’re a customer absolutely doesn’t entitle them to fraudulently put false non-working unsubscribe links in their email at you. And their disrespect deserves nothing but contempt.
“Hey buddy! We’ve done business before, maybe I can sell you something else.”
“I’ll let you know if I want something. Leave me alone now.”
“No. I’m going to bug you forever now.”
“I’ll ignore you forever now.”
shrug works for me. I just unsubscribed from some GoDaddy mails, for example. I have done business with them in the past.
Your advice to not follow random unsub links from actual spam is valid, but I virtually never see actual spam, thanks to Google getting quite good at defeating it, and I tip my hat to that team.
Some shithead used my email address, or it was written down wrong, for some NYC-headquartered Forever 21/A & F/Anthropologie Youth retail clothing brand (ETA: Aeropostale!). I tried three times to unsubscribe from the mailers, waited the appropriate time interval for removal, but they kept coming. I emailed twice to request my name be removed, and Marketing said they’d take care of it, but didn’t.
I emailed all the Executive VPs with screenshot evidence of systemic failure to remove my email address from marketing emails, and telephoned the CEO, and told them the truth that they can be penalized thousands of dollars for unsolicited commercial email violations to the CAN-SPAM Act, and after the second failure to remove my name from their CRM database I forwarded subsequent UCEs, and the entire email trail of “please remove me/yes, we promise/I mean it/so do we/I had to escalate this issue what is wrong with you” to the Federal Trade Commission.
An Executive VP personally removed the email address from the database. I do not know why Marketing underlings can’t manage something so simple. I hope the Exec ripped into them.
The company sought Chapter 11 protection early this year.
