[Techtalk] Dealing with allegedly respectable company who send spam

[Jan]

On Monday 30 November 2009 21:51:35 TraceyC wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-11-30 at 19:13 +0000, Jan wrote:
> > Whilst I don't particularly want to do anything that will disrupt their
> > business I do want them realise that they are being annoying and would
> > appreciate any advice about how to proceed (ie can I get their marketing
> > domain on a spam blacklist and if so what steps to I need to take?)
>
> Putting them on a blacklist will disrupt their business when their mail
> servers are blocked from sending e-mail, including the spam. This is
> something I have done when I've found myself in this situation. When a
> company fails to respond to polite requests to stop sending spam, as you
> have made, then blacklisting is sometimes the only way to get them to
> listen. If they are disrupting your e-mail by sending unwanted
> commercial messages, and eating your bandwidth, you are not obligated to
> feel pity for submitting their spam to blacklist services. They are
> ignoring your polite requests and your boundaries, you have no
> obligation to be extra polite to them.

Thanks for this.  I'm going to have one more go at contacting the company 
citing the legislation that Adam linked to and if that doesn't work I will 
register them with spamcop.  I do have a separate email address that I give 
out where I don't know a company or suspect that they may just be harvesting 
addresses and it works quite well. But there are some companies you just don't 
expect this behaviour from.

I had a bit of a spam problem a couple of years ago with John Lewis 
Partnership (well know UK department store) but all it took was a phone call 
and not only did the spam stop I got £50 of vouchers as an apology for the 
inconvenience caused by their 'data entry error'.  Also after upgrading my sky 
tv packages last year I got mailings from them despite going into the online 
account and setting everything to no mail.  Again the technical team were 
helpful in determining why I was getting unwanted mailings and did everything 
they could to resolve the problem (caused by a broken script apparently).  

In this case I was dealing with Jessops (www.jessops.com).  They are, in all 
other respects, a reputable company and, as in the above cases, I had 
absolutely no reason to believe, that they would behave like this.  After all 
I had interrogated the sales staff who had assured me that my email would not 
be used for marketing mail.  I suspect it is cluelessness on the part of their 
IT/web staff which is why I don't want to disrupt their business if I don't 
have to but if that's what it takes then so be it.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Jan
Edinburgh