Rubenerd

For years, I've been getting junk mail from Cisco. Two prerequisites for my IT degree were required from them, and despite graduating from them years ago they've yet to cease their baragge of marketing and seminar messages.

I could never figure out how to unsubscribe, so I had to create a special drop filter in my mail client. Since moving to another web provider without these filters, I noticed them appearing again.

For fun, I tried unsubscribing again. Here were the steps.

1. Clicked unsubscribe in their latest mail. This took me to their homepage. Already, strike one, it should take more than one click to unsubscribe from an email, let alone sending the user to a login screen. In this case they didn't even manage that.

2. Logged into the Cisco Networking Academy, which is a different login form to the one I was directed to.

3. Went to my profile, and underneath the cobwebs and dust I verified that no checkboxes in the two notification preference screens were checked.

4. Since I was logged in, I tried going back to my email and clicking unsubscribe again. Was taken to their homepage.

Further down in the email, it said this:

Do you want to unsubscribe or change messaging preferences from Cisco Networking Academy? Academy connection users click here and NetSpace users click here.

I clicked both those links. One took me to their homepage, the other to
my profile.

I post this not to whinge, but as a cautionary tale for those implementing webmail notifications. If you don't make it easy for us to unsubscribe to your messages, or outsource said responsibilities to someone who does, you will only breed resentment and mail drop filters for addresses like this:

<news_netacad@ciscona-apacenglish.imakenews.net>

Speaking of which, this is the domain that seems to generate the most junk. Block this, and you're mostly fine.