I'm feeling the need to rant about something. Here we go...
So, I'm really careful with my email address. I give my real email only to people I actually know. For everyone else, there's aliases. I have several tiers of aliases (and even entire email accounts) that I give to organizations of various repute, the idea being that if one of these aliases starts getting spam I can simply change it and move on without having to bother letting people know that my email has changed.
These practices have paid off - I receive, at most, around one illegitimate spam message per month. Legitimate spam is, however, a completely different story.
A necessary evil of doing business on the Internet is that you have to give out your email address. The reason this is evil is because these entities, nearly without exception, abuse this relationship in an attempt to get more money from you. They want you to feel confident that they won't do this, so they put a checkbox (consistently and unfailingly checked by default) that says something to the effect of, "YES! Do please send me all your crappy spamletters!" I consistently and unfailingly uncheck all of these checkboxes. Do you think that stops them?
No. Apparently those checkboxes are simply there for psychological manipulation, as nobody seems to have any intention of honoring that preference. I'd be surprised if they even bother to save it. Almost without fail, regardless of my stated preference, these businesses will start sending me unwanted newsletters and promotional offers.
Fortunately, they all (with one exception) honor an explicit unsubscribe request. However, they require you to get at least one crapmail before they'll allow you to get off the list, and even though it's a simple thing to click an unsubscribe link and hit delete, the cumulative annoyance of having to do it every time I enter a business relationship with a new entity is really starting to wear on me.
What's the one exception I mentioned above? Pizza Hut! If you order pizza from pizzahut.com, don't give them your real email address (or even, as I did, your "most trusted" alias) because you can NEVER get off their list. After about 30 unsubscribe link clicks and two emails to their contact address (one polite, the other demanding), I finally decided to make a filter to shunt all their crap into my Junk folder and never buy pizza from them again.
Is that overreacting? Maybe, but it's all I have. Unfortunately, I can't do it very often or I'd never shop online at all, because like I said, they all abuse the relationship.
There, I ranted. Now, back to clicking those "unsubscribe" links...
