Thursday, February 22, 2007
How to Make A Gigantic Email Mistake
Yesterday, I received an email from Industry magazine, which is apparently some kind of franchised "high-end, city-focus lifestyle" publication. I was being invited to some event or other.
Frankly, I ignored the email, since I tend to get a lot of spam from public relations folks who don't seem to realize that, simply because I occasionally blog, I don't actually run any press releases or base any of my posts on press releases that wander uninvited into my email box (except, of course, the email I'm writing about today).
But then the fun started. Evidently the good folks at Industry cobbled together an email list, and spammed a bunch of people. Nothing terribly unusual about that. But the problem was, they made the email FROM the same list that they sent it TO. As a result, everyone who replied with an unsubscribe request managed to send that request to everyone else who got the original email. And then a bunch of people started emailing that they were getting unsubscribe requests for things they didn't send out. And then another slew of unsubscribe requests to those replies came in. I--and everyone else who got the email--got to see everything (thankfully, it was all trapped in my Spam filter).
Well done, Industry! You've not only illegally spammed a bunch of people, but you did it in a way that guaranteed maximum confusion and maximum damage to your inelegantly named "brand."
Comments
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Frankly, I ignored the email, since I tend to get a lot of spam from public relations folks who don't seem to realize that, simply because I occasionally blog, I don't actually run any press releases or base any of my posts on press releases that wander uninvited into my email box (except, of course, the email I'm writing about today).
But then the fun started. Evidently the good folks at Industry cobbled together an email list, and spammed a bunch of people. Nothing terribly unusual about that. But the problem was, they made the email FROM the same list that they sent it TO. As a result, everyone who replied with an unsubscribe request managed to send that request to everyone else who got the original email. And then a bunch of people started emailing that they were getting unsubscribe requests for things they didn't send out. And then another slew of unsubscribe requests to those replies came in. I--and everyone else who got the email--got to see everything (thankfully, it was all trapped in my Spam filter).
Well done, Industry! You've not only illegally spammed a bunch of people, but you did it in a way that guaranteed maximum confusion and maximum damage to your inelegantly named "brand."
