I subscribed to what?

Tomorrow is GDPR day. That’s the day when the new Global Data Protection Regulations take effect in the EU. I’m sure everyone reading this blog has seen dozens, if not hundreds, of blog posts, articles, webinars, and guidance docs about how to comply. I’m not going to rehash it because, other folks know this better than me.
There are a some things I’m finding fascinating watching  this whole GDPR thing.
First, the number of companies who have my addresses and I don’t know why. Take Newsweek (yes, the magazine people). They’re sending GDPR notifications to my LinkedIn address. I can’t figure out why they’re harvesting / buying addresses from LinkedIn. Then there’s SALESmango who are some company that started spamming me a few years ago and refuses to accept unsubscribe request. They’re sending me opt-in requests. Yeah, no, go away. I told you to stop, but wow, you won’t.
Another interesting piece is just how much I’ve signed up for over the last 18 – 20 years I’ve been using this set of addresses. Wow. So much mail. And, generally, I thought of myself as relatively careful in who I gave email addresses to. I don’t normally go around dropping addresses into forms but even a couple a month adds up over 20 years.
Then there are the companies violating CAN SPAM in one way or another. Sending mail to unsubscribed addresses and refusing to include an opt-out link are the two things I’ve seen regularly. Yeah, no. I think it’s safe to say that if I’ve opted out from receiving your mail, you should probably put my data away in a dark closet and not touch it again. But.. but.. but… But nothing. Go away. As for the lack of an unsubscribe link, get over yourself. You’re not that special. I don’t think that this really is something that counts for exemption.
Also, is there an official template? So many of these emails look identical. I have to give credit to whomever did it first. Because if plagiarism is the sincerest form of praise, you have an entire industry praising you.
Finally, it’s been amusing to watch the general frustration with all the GDPR mail. It seems many people are getting tired of the deluge. That’s OK, though, it should end by Saturday. Or so we can only hope.
 

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The problem is there are a lot of major companies out there that don’t honor opt-outs. Since earlier this year I’ve been tracking when I opt-out of mail. Why? Because I kept getting the feeling that I’d opted out of mail before, but kept getting it.
The good(?) news is that it wasn’t my imagination, some of these companies aren’t honoring their opt-outs. The bad news is that major companies are not honoring opt-outs.

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In the early years of the spam problem, a common piece of advice was to never unsubscribe. At the time, this made a lot of sense. Multiple anti-spammers documented spammers harvesting addresses from unsubscribe forms. This activity tapered off around 2000 or so, although the myth persisted for much longer.

These days, there isn’t much harm in unsubscribing. I even spent a full month unsubscribing from spam at one of my dormant accounts (Yes, spam is still a problem). While the graph shows an initial increase in spam, levels dropped for the next few months. By the time I cancelled the account in 2017, spam levels were at very low. I don’t know if the decrease was due to the unsubscribing or if there were improvements in the filtering appliance the ISP used.
More recently the biggest problem is senders that don’t honor unsubscribes. There are a lot of reasons this can happen and they’re not all malicious. Still, too many companies don’t care enough to actually make sure their unsubscribe process is working. I’ve had way too many companies “lose” unsubscribe requests, sometimes years after I asked them to stop. I expect many of these cases are accidents. They switch ESPs and decide or forget or otherwise fail to transfer unsubscribes to the new ESP. But, in other cases, there doesn’t seem to be any ESP change. It appears the companies think that they can reactivate unsubscribes at some point (pro tip: there is no expiration on legally required unsubscribe requests).
All of this leads to my current recommendation: yeah, unsub if you feel like it, it’s unlikely to hurt, and it’s possible it will help. But, don’t expect them to actually work permanently. Companies just don’t care enough to make them permanent.
 
 

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