LifeLeague says: we’re not spammers. Except there’s no way to get off the mailing list
At some stage in the past someone - not me - thought it would be a good idea to add my name to the mailing list for LifeLeague. (It’s an anti-abortion lobbying group. Or “pro-life”, if you prefer.)
This sort of thing happens a lot. PR company buys in mailing list from middle person who assures them that all these people have expressed enormous interest in receiving all sorts of junk on this topic. Especially if those on the list are journalists, whose appetite for rubbish filling their inboxes is, as is well known by all PR folk, both endless and legendary. Our lives aren’t complete without 15 emails about subjects we once wrote one story about five years ago filling our inbox ahead of the much more important Facebook updates, and meaning we go over our mailbox quotas and have to delete emails in the manner of someone bailing out a boat.
Anyway. Lifeleague’s email contains the following bold statement:
Unsubscribing from The LifeLeague e-newsletter
Those of you not wishing to receive our e-news and e-alerts can immediately unsubscribe yourselves by clicking here or replying to this email (write the words NO ENEWS in the subject box). Thank you so much.
Which basically creates an email from your address to unsubscribe@lifeleaguenews.com with the subject - and they set it up, so blame them for the capitals - “PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE ME FROM THE LIFELEAGUE MAILING LIST…”
Yeah, well, I tried that. Still keep getting the emails. Tried it again. Still got them. (No acknowledgement either that the original was received.) I tried emailing every address I could find on the email, threatening.. er.. this.
No response.
It all makes a mockery of LifeLeague’s proud claim at the end of its email that The LifeLeague Are An Anti-Spam Organisation.
You know what? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably spam. I’ve filtered them all directly to junk, but it’s still annoying. Equally, I could head them off at the pass (via Gmail’s spam filter), but again - they put me on their list. They could take me off.
And so the message gets lost in the medium - one is so annoyed by the spaminess of the messages that there’s little chance of reading them except to find some sort of anti-LifeLeague story.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- This is just *madness*: more than a thousand attempted comment spams a day (7 December 2004; score: 44.98%)
- Sometimes you forget that there are clueless spammers too (18 January 2005; score: 40.26%)
- How are would-be spammers registering on my Wordpress blog if I've disabled registering? (15 February 2007; score: 39.71%)
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October 31st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
It might be that the email address you are trying to unsubscribe is not the one they are sending it to e.g xyz@charlesarthur.
Anyway you have got to love any organisation that USES 36 POINT RED CENTRED TEXT on their opening page and where the link to “Visit LifLeague’s Website” (I thought I was already on the website) doesn’t work.
There are some phone numbers there, so it might be worth expending another N minutes of your life. Good Luck!
October 31st, 2007 at 11:33 pm
@commenter - no, I’m sure I’ve got the right email, because I checked the headers of the email I received.
Why should I waste more time on them? Though I suspect I did ring them - and got an answerphone.
I’ll just tell Gmail that they’re spammers - that might get them marked as spam all across Gmail. Maybe that would be a more useful lesson.
November 26th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
They’re spamming me as well. I’ve tried unsubscribing for over 6 months now and nothing. No one ever put me on their list, they grabbed my email address from Usenet posts from years ago.
-Randy