unsubscribe

[j4]

On unsubscribing from some newsletter or other:

'This is the last email you will receive from us. We have added you to our "blacklist", which means that our newsletter system will refuse to send you any other email, without manual intervention by our administrator.'

Er, blacklist? Can't they just take me off the mailing list? Am I missing something, or are they talking rubbish?

I am unsubscribing from a lot of newsletters and things at the moment, having realised that all I do is either a) delete them unread with a faint sense of guilt; b) keep them for ages meaning to read them, before deleting them with a slightly less faint sense of guilt; c) read them and keep them for ages meaning to act on them, before deleting them with a fairly tangible sense of guilt; or d) read them, get angry, and keep them for ages meaning to reply/argue/complain, before eventually deleting them with a sense of guilt mixed with frustration and anger. None of which is doing anybody any good.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

Is it the sort of newsletter to which people might have been nonconsensually subscribed in large numbers and consider as spam?

It's a London music venue's "what's on" mailout, and I think I deliberately signed up for it (it would've been a plausible thing to do when I was going to more gigs in London), though that doesn't mean that they didn't also subscribe people nonconsensually... But why attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by a general arse/elbow confusion? :)

[simont]

*nods* I didn't really mean to suggest that they might have maliciously subscribed people nonconsensually. I get a lot of mail suggesting I've been randomly subscribed to newsletters which I've never heard of, and while some of them undoubtedly are deliberate spam, my feeling is that a lot of them are probably accidental subscriptions resulting from somebody totally other having forged spam in my name to their subscribe addresses and, well, arse/elbow confusion having occurred at the verification step.

[redbird]

And I get a few because I have a vanity domain, and people sign up for mailings under $randomname@redbird.org (it's configured so mail to $random@redbird.org goes into a box labeled "not here", from which I pick out a few things I do want, reply to the once-in-a-blue-moon stuff that gets "Dear user, I think you meant to write to $random@redbird.NET, signed postmaster", and delete the rest). There's much less of that than of actual spam, though it's hard to be sure whether the crap that "Rob" is getting there from classmates.com is spam or legitimate error.