Tue 23 Apr 2013 12:56
Handling Unsolicited Commercial Email
My email address is all over the web: at the time of writing this, a search on google for my email address produces about 15,800 results. So anyone who wants to find my email address can do so easily. Many people or companies who want to sell me something send me email out of the blue. I get a great deal of such unsolicited commercial email, too much to read or pay adequate attention to. I simply delete them. Unfortunately, many sources of such email persist. So for some time now, I've elicited the help of technology. I process my incoming email using procmail, a powerful piece of software that lets me script what happens to my email. When I receive unsolicited commercial email, if it is from a vendor or organization I don't have a relationship with, I will often add a procmail rule to discard, unseen, all future email messages from that vendor. I've got about 400 organizations (mostly vendors) in my discard list so far, and the list slowly grows. Am I still getting unsolicited commercial email from these sources? I am, but I am not seeing it. It's the same effect, really, as manual deletion (i.e. the message is deleted, unread), but it's easier for me, because I am not interrupted. But of course I think it would be better still if the email were not sent at all.
If you are a vendor with whom I do not have a pre-existing relationship, and you want to send me email introducing your products, please don't. I do not accept cold salescalls either. Instead, advertise effectively on the web, so that if I am looking for a product like yours, I can find you. If you must contact me directly, send me something by postal mail, where, unlike email, the communication does not have an interruptive aspect.