After getting all these hate letters from people who didn’t approve of what I thought were fairly tame commentaries on the compulsory Australian internet firewall, I decided to take an hour or so off this afternoon and address their concerns. This post is for the first email.
Having posted several entries on the Australian Government’s plan to implement a compulsory national internet filter, it seems I’ve unwittingly rattled a few nerves. For the first time since coming out as an atheist back in 2007 I’ve started receiving email about a series of posts here, all of them not good.
Dear CNET Member: Get ready for this year’s big game by creating a new list on CNET, and enter to win a new LED TV in the Samsung Super Bowl Wish List Sweepstakes! [...]
SWEEPSTAKES OPEN TO LEGAL RESIDENTS OF ONE OF THE 50 UNITED STATES OR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AT LEAST 18 YEARS OR AGE OF MAJORITY IN STATE OF RESIDENCE AND OLDER ON DATE OF ENTRY. [...]
Dear CNET, I provided my location in my account profile with you, please don’t send me spam that doesn’t even relate to me. Sincerely, Ruben in Singapore and Australia.
This sort of thing happens to me all the time, and not just from CNET. How hard would it be to check a user’s provided country before sending them offers and competitions they’re not eligible for? One or two extra lines of code?
Fornicate like a macho!
Enlarge your male dignity!
[redacted spam link]
Clearly you have a differing view on the subject of dignity than I do, spammer person. Now if you’d excuse me, I’m off to a coffee shop while wearing this shirt.
I didn’t say I had any dignity, just that they’re idea of it is different to my own. Grilled cheese sandwiches and whatnot.
rubenerd,
As mentioned last week, because you’ve posted articles, photos or video to NowPublic [I have?], our sister site [redacted], is now personally inviting you to also become an Examiner for the US or Canadian city where you live – chose from 160 – or for one of the two national editions.
(emphasis added)
If this was an autogenerated email, it wouldn’t have taken much effort for them to see that I’m clearly not from either place! I suppose it’s too much to ask for spam to at least be slightly relevant ;).
Are you fed up with constantly checking and deleting messages from your UniSA student email account because of the tiny quota? Turns out you can have your messages redirected to an outside account. I can breathe easier now!
It’s probably a combination of reverse psychology and the need to stick it to the man, but I wonder how many more emails have been needlessly printed since people started following the advice of sites like ThinkBeforePrinting.org and started appending “Please consider the environment before printing this email?”.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…
Spammers often add random sentences to their messages to fool filters, some of which end up being oddly amusing and almost poetic in a bizarre sort of way.
This morning I got the following email offering me the opportunity to create paid posts. Aside from the fact I would never agree to do it unless I’d be allowed to explicitly say I was paid to create a post, it looks a tad suspicious to me. Whaddya thing?
Dear Ruben,
As part of expanding our [redacted], we search the net for high quality blogs and gifted web writes. I’ve visited your website and read some of your recent posts, including Back at KLIA at night again, virtually.
Ruben, you definitely have a unique and interesting writing style and an intriguing high quality blog. Since you and your blog meet our quality guidelines, we would like to offer you to join to our unique and highly rewarding program.
About the program – The program links our customers with gifted writers like you and pays them for writing short articles. You already do that, so I’m sure you will be happy to be rewarded for your talent. We do not ask nor expect you to write ads; rather, we give you complete writing freedom and appreciate your creativity and imagination.
I hope you find the concept of our program interesting, and would be happy to provide you more information about it. Please email me back and in the mean time feel free to visit our website [redacted]
If this email does not interest you, I apologize and I will not contact you again.
Sincerely, [redacted]
After briefly using their service I decided to stop using Evernote, for me having a personal wiki that I host myself and can edit on my iTelephone and my computers made much more sense, plus it’s free and doesn’t need extra software. So this morning I severed my final ties and unsubscribed to Evernote’s email newsletters. When I did, I got the message you see above.
Leaving aside the issue with email newsletters being an archaic and outdated model for sending out information in a world of web feeds like RSS, why do companies that add you to their email newsletter mailing lists always require such an inordinate amount of time to unsubscribe you? Evernote claims here that they need up to two weeks to delete me from their database; an action that on any other database would only takes milliseconds. There is no technological reason I can see for this.
So in rhetorical style we must ask ourselves: why do they do this? Is it so they can keep you on their list for an extra two weeks and send you more advertising? Is it like an opt-out system that some laws now require, but one that guarantees a minimum of two weeks of advertising to unsuspecting people?
Again it wouldn’t be so annoying if this kind of silly behaviour were only exhibited by a few select companies, but virtually everybody does it. I wonder if there’s a blacklist for companies that pull these kinds of stunts?
By the way, I’m typing this blog post from my new Unicomp buckling spring keyboard. Just in case you wanted to know :-)
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
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