New unsubscribe methods in the news

The folks at The Daily Show, who brought us the wonderful term “High Volume Email Deployer” so very long ago, are once again leading the way in new unsubscribe technology. Unsubscribe by television.

Meanwhile, the folks at The Daily Mash have a different unsubscribe suggestion.

MEMBERSHIP of networking website LinkedIn can only be terminated by destroying its corporate headquarters, it has emerged.

Of course, these suggestions are only funny because so many of us get mail from LinkedIn that we didn’t expect. Invites from people we don’t know. Updates for things we didn’t subscribe to. Marketing from companies scraping addresses off the website. Just last week someone unconnected to me used the LinkedIn system to try and sell me his 72 Million email address list.
Companies can get away with bad email practices if they’re bringing value to the recipient. But when those practices are so bad that they become the butt of jokes, there has to be an awful lot of value to overcome the negative reputation. It’s possible that LinkedIn is approaching the tipping point where their mail is more annoying than their service is useful.

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Bad unsubscribe processes

We recently renewed our support contract with VMWare. It’s a weirdly complicated system, in that we can’t buy directly from VMWare, but have to buy through one of their resellers. In this case, we purchased the original hardware from Dell, so we renewed our contract through Dell.
Dell sends my email address over to VMWare as part of the transaction.
My only role in this is as CFO. I approve the purchase and pay the bill. I don’t do anything technical with the license.
The email failures start when VMWare decides that I need to receive mail about some user group meetings they’re holding all over the US. First off, I’m not the right person to be sending this mail to inside our company. I’m the billing contact, not the user contact. Then, they send me mail about meetings all over the US, when they know exactly where I’m located. Would it be so hard to do a semi-personalized version that highlighted the meetings in my local area then pointing out the other locations? Apparently, yes, it is so hard.
The biggest failures, though are in the unsubscribe process.
unsubscribe option
The unsubscribe page is no big deal. I get to unsub from all VMWare communications, and submit that request without having to figure out what my VMWare password is or anything.
After I hit submit, I’m taken to this page.
VMWareThank you
Wait? What?
“Thank you for registering?” I didn’t register! I don’t want you to contact me. Plus, this is a HP co-branded page when I’m not a customer of HP. VMWare knows this, they know they got my address from Dell.
The biggest problem is that I’m not sure that my address was actually unsubscribed. I suspect that someone copied a form from elsewhere on the site to use as an unsubscribe form. This person forgot to change the link after the “submit” button was clicked. But what else did they forget to change? Is the unsubscribe actually registered in the database?
I suppose only time will tell if VMWare actually processed my unsubscribe. If they didn’t they’re technically in violation of CAN SPAM.
The lesson, though, is someone should check unsubscribe forms. Someone in marketing should own the unsubscribe process, and that includes confirming that unsubscribe pages work well enough.

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Barracuda filters clicking all links

Earlier this month I mentioned that a number of people were seeing issues with multiple links in emails being clicked by Barracuda filters. I invited readers to contact me and provide me with any information or evidence they had. Not only did a number of senders contact me, but one of the support reps at Barracuda also contacted me.
At issue is a part of the Barracuda email filter call the intent filter. There are 3 different modules to this filter.

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Fines for not honoring unsubscribes

Virgin Blue has been fined $110,000 by the Australian government for not honoring unsubscribes.

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