Raoul Pop

For the past couple of months, I’ve been getting spammed by a German company that shall remain unnamed, since they don’t deserve the extra publicity, bad as it may be. I mentioned them in one of my old posts, or rather I linked to a TechCrunch post that talked about them. I figured I probably got added to their mailing list by mistake, and instead of clicking the “Report Spam” button in Gmail every time I got one of their emails, I deleted it, not wanting to hurt their email campaigns.

Today, I got another one of their emails, and I’d had enough. I wrote back to the guy sending them, and asked him to be taken off the list. Also informed him that I had never requested to be added to the list, and that I considered their emails unsolicited. He responded, and we had a pretty annoying (and time-wasting) back and forth. Basically, he didn’t care that I didn’t want his emails, and he wanted to antagonize me. His reasoning was that since I mentioned them in one of my posts, and I ask people to submit stories to me, I must be interested in his company, and therefore I shouldn’t complain about getting his emails. He didn’t seem to grasp (or didn’t want to grasp) the fact that any repeated, unsolicited emails are spam, and that adding me to his list without my permission is an act of spam.

So, because I wanted to be nice and not play a role in his domain getting blacklisted, I ended up being antagonized and lightly ridiculed. Thanks for nothing, right? So, in my final response to him, I informed him that the post on ComeAcross that mentioned his company was removed. Why should I promote a company that is this rude to the people helping it get publicity? Any future emails from them will be reported as spam, promptly. Not only that, but I probably won’t waste my time talking to people like this in the future. I’ll report them as spammers right away.

A word of advice to the PR/Marketing folks out there: if someone doesn’t ask to be placed on a mailing list, don’t put them on it. If you want to add them, ask them personally first. And certainly don’t annoy them when they ask to be taken off. If you want a blogger to write about you, a blanket mass email (like the stuff I got from this clueless German dude) doesn’t work. You need to craft a personal email, targeted to that blogger. And be nice. It pays off in the end.