Unsubscribing from spam, part 2

Yesterday I posted about why the reasons a lot of people give for not unsubscribing from spam are mostly wrong. Unsubscribing from spam doesn’t seem to confirm your address and it doesn’t seem to increase your spam load.
But does that mean you should unsubscribe from spam? I’m not sure about that.
I’ve been working on a project where I am unsubscribing from every message coming into one of my email addresses. Weeks into that process I’m not seeing a huge decrease in the amount of mail that address is receiving. In some cases I’m unsubscribing from the same senders multiple times a day and have been for close to 3 weeks.
While unsubscribing doesn’t increase your spam, I’m also not sure it decreases your spam, either. But I’ll have full data and numbers demonstrating that in a few more weeks.
What can have an effect on the amount of spam you get is complaining about spam, at least according to Brian Krebs.

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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.
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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.
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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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