I periodically post about organizations which can’t handle one of these two simple requests: (1) don’t spam me; (2) don’t send me junk mail. If an organization is incapable of implementing effective policies and procedures to accommodate these two straightforward requests from donors, they are probably also incapable of implementing effective, efficient policies and procedures for doing the work for which donors are sending them money.
I’ve had run-ins of varying magnitude about this with numerous organizations over the years. The ones that I post about here are the worst of the worst. They have either overtly refused to accommodate my requests, or claimed repeatedly, but falsely, that they had done so.
Today, I am forced to add Yad Sarah to this disreputable bunch. I am sorry to do this, because the work Yad Sarah claims to do is important, and because they appear to be respected by other organizations which I respect and tend to trust. However, after my experience with them, I must wonder how efficiently and effectively they use the money entrusted to them by donors to perform their mission.
Yet another chapter in the saga of the political spam I can’t seem to put a stop to, courtesy of ex-Congressman Robert Wexler. I’ve just been spammed by Scott Maddox, who is running for Florida Commissioner of Agriculture & Consumer Services. Like I care!
American Honda Motor Company, Incorporated
Honda Automobile Customer Service
Fax: (310) 783-3023
To whom it may concern:
I sent you the attached letter via fax on November 17. You did not give me the courtesy of a reply, but at least the spam directed at my wife’s email address seems to have stopped.
Unfortunately, now Honda Village is spamming MY email address, jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us, instead of my wife’s.
Last November, I posted on my blog a copy of a letter which I faxed to Congressman Robert Wexler, in which I chastised him for giving my email address (which I gave him when I made a donation to his campaign, so that he could send me a receipt) to another politician’s campaign and demanded that he remove my address from all lists and databases under his control.
A friend, Michael Burstein, commented on that blog entry, “Wexler is a good guy, so I can’t I imagine that he and his staff won’t take steps to fix this. Let us know once he has.”
Alas, my friend was incorrect. I received no response from Wexler or anyone on his staff, and today, I received another piece of spam at the email address I had given to Wexler, from the campaign of yet another politician, Ted Deutch. Although the spam came from “campaign@tedforcongress.com”, the letter in it was signed by Congressman Wexler, making it all the more clear that he provided the mailing list to Deutch.
Many are saying that one of the reasons why the Democrats lost yesterday’s special election in Massachusetts is because they are acting like elitist snobs. I’m not fan of the Republicans and I voted for Coakley yesterday, but I can absolutely understand why people feel that way. I think there’s a lot of truth to it, and I think that this unrepentant spamming from Wexler is a symptom of it.
Congressman Wexler: What you have to say to me is not so important that you get to say it when I’ve told you to leave me alone. Your fellow Democratic politicians are not so critical to the future of this country that you get to share my email address with them when I’ve never given you permission and indeed asked you not to. You are not so high and mighty that you get to ignore my letters to you with impunity. You, sir, have lost my trust, and you will not soon regain it.
Around twenty years ago when I was at MIT, I spent far more hours than I care to contemplate combating anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist and anti-Israel propaganda on Usenet.
This was back before the Web took off, and Usenet was the happening place for bigots, racists and nutjobs of all sort to spread their filth and lies. There were a lot of them, and they were extremely prolific. Some of them were working alone, but many belonged to, and were being supported and assisted by, organized hate groups.
My most potent weapons in the fight were Near East Report, a newsletter still published biweekly by AIPAC, and Myths & Facts, a collection of articles about the Arab-Israeli conflict which AIPAC updated and published annually. Unfortunately, neither NEAR nor M&F was then available in any sort of electronic format, so I spent a great deal of time typing in articles to post as rebuttals to the haters.
Although there were plenty of hate groups actively spreading lies on Usenet, there wasn’t a single pro-Jewish or pro-Israel group with any sort of online presence or footprint. AIPAC, the ADL, B’nai B’rith, etc. had all simply completely missed the boat — they were completely conceding the game to the haters on-line. I was completely on my own.
Some time around 1991 or 1992, I finally got enough of a life (i.e., a girlfriend and a full-time job that I had no interest in continuing to spend the many hours per week that I was spending fighting the hate. Given that I had been relying on information published by AIPAC, I decided to try to get in touch with someone at AIPAC who might be able to allocate resources to put their stuff on-line, hire some people to fight hate on Usenet, etc. Somehow, I actually succeeded at reaching the right person, and he and I had a long telephone conversation. I can still remember pacing back and forth with my cell phone in the lounge of the old Boston University Hillel building while trying, unsuccessfully, to convince him that on-line hate was a significant enough problem to warrant AIPAC expending some resources to combat it. AIPAC was completely unaware of the hate being spread on-line.
That has changed, obviously, but it was somewhat disillusioning to me to realize just how clueless AIPAC was about technology and its potential both for spreading hate and opposing it.
Now fast-forward 20 years, to November 2009. Somehow, my wife got her email address into AIPAC’s database (she insists that she never subscribed to any of their lists or gave them or anyone else permission to subscribe her), and they started spamming her. She clicked on the unsubscribe link in the first spam message she received from them. A little over a month later, they spammed her again. I sent them and their network service providers a strongly worded complaint, to which I received no response. Two weeks later, they spammed my wife a third time, so I picked up the phone, called their national headquarters (202-639-5198), and asked to speak to whoever was responsible for the fact that AIPAC continued to spam my wife despite repeated requests for them to stop.
The woman who answered the phone, who identified herself as Julia, asked for my wife’s name and email address and said that she would ensure that she was properly unsubscribed. I said that while I would appreciate if she did that, I was more concerned with what was going to be done about the larger problem that their unsubscribe link didn’t work and my email to them had gone unanswered.
Paraphrasing her response: “Problem? What problem? I don’t see a problem.”
We went back and forth several times with me trying, unsuccessfully, to get her to acknowledge that (a) when there’s an unsubscribe link in your bulk email, it should work; (b) when someone sends you email asking to be unsubscribed, you should unsubscribe them and send them a response; (c) making people call your national headquarters to unsubscribe is not OK; and (c) making the on-line unsubscribe process work properly is more important than unsubscribing one complaining person.
When I expressed my dissatisfaction with her handling of the matter and asked to speak to someone else, Julia insisted that she was solely responsible for AIPAC’s bulk e-mail processes and there was no one else with whom I could speak.
Twenty years ago, AIPAC was completely clueless of on-line hate speech, which had been getting worse and worse for years. Now, AIPAC is completely clueless about responsible bulk email practices and not being a source of spam, a problem which has been getting worse and worse for years. Go figure.
Today, I received a commercial email message from Sears Home Services, a.k.a., Sears Holdings Corporation. They got my email address when I made a service appointment through their Web site, which I subsequently canceled when it became clear that they were going to charge me more than a local repair man.
The email message contained no instructions for opting out of future commercial email messages. This is a clear and direct violation of the Federal CAN-SPAM act (see requirement 5 in The FTC’s CAN-SPAM Act Compliance Guide for Business).
From time to time, we may send you e-mails with promotional offers if you opt-in to receiving such emails. If you would no longer like to receive e-mailed special event information, sales notifications or other promotional messages from this web site, you can unsubscribe from this site’s e-mail marketing list by following the unsubscribe link located at the bottom of each promotional e-mail. Your e-mail address will be removed from this site’s email marketing list within 10 days.
Therefore, in addition to violating the CAN-SPAM Act, they also violated their own published privacy policy.
Their Web site claims that registered users can edit settings on the site to tell Sears “whether you wish to receive e-mail about special sales, promotions and other events.” So I registered on the site, using the same email address they spammed me on. When I looked at my profile after registering, it said that I’m not subscribed to receive any email from them. Nice!
There are no instructions in their privacy policy for how to notify them about violations.
I just sent the following email message to Mark G. Ackermann, the President and CEO of Lighthouse International:
Dear Mr. Ackermann,
I am taking the unusual step of writing to you because my efforts to get this issue resolved “through channels” for over two years have failed.
In a nutshell, I have asked Lighthouse International to remove me from your postal mailing list six times since October 2007. Since my first request, you have sent me eight mailings, the most recent received yesterday, November 25.
Congressman Robert Wexler
2241 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Fax: (202) 225-5974
Dear Congressman Wexler,
In May 2008, a letter from you to one of your supporters was forwarded to the Jews for Obama listserv with the introduction, “As you all know, Congressman Wexler has been a strong Obama supporter and advisor to the campaign. Please help him in his re-election bid. Thanks.”
In response, I sent a donation to your campaign, one which I couldn’t really afford given how much I had already spent to help Obama.
When I donated to you, I specified a unique email address, [elided]. Today I received an email message to that address from “Marcy Winograd for Congress”. Since the only time I’ve ever given out that email address to anyone is when I donated to your campaign, the only way Winograd’s campaign could have gotten the address is from you. Shame on you.
American Honda Motor Company, Incorporated
Honda Automobile Customer Service
Fax: (310) 783-3023
To whom it may concern:
HONDA HAS BEEN SPAMMING US FOR TWO YEARS DESPITE OUR REPEATED REQUESTS FOR YOU TO STOP. This is completely unacceptable. You need to make it stop.
In mid-2007, we bought an Odyssey from Honda Village in Newton, MA. While shopping for it, my wife made the mistake of giving the dealer her email address ([elided]) on a pre-sales Web form. Since then, we’ve been spammed many times, despite repeated attempts to make it stop. Here’s a sampling: (more…)
My wife and I have supported literally hundreds of charitable organizations over the years. I donate on-line whenever possible, which means that many of these organizations have my email address. The vast majority of them are smart and reputable enough not to send me bulk email I didn’t agree to receive, or at worst to unsubscribe me from their bulk mailings when I ask them to do so.
Alas, there are a few organizations whose bulk email practices are so disreputable, so shameful, so entirely unacceptable, that when all else fails, my only remaining recourse is to attempt to shame them into cleaning up their act, and to urge others not to support them financially until they’ve done so.
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that I had no interest in continuing to spend the many hours per week that I was spending fighting the hate. Given that I had been relying on information published by AIPAC, I decided to try to get in touch with someone at AIPAC who might be able to allocate resources to put their stuff on-line, hire some people to fight hate on Usenet, etc. Somehow, I actually succeeded at reaching the right person, and he and I had a long telephone conversation. I can still remember pacing back and forth with my cell phone in the lounge of the old Boston University Hillel building while trying, unsuccessfully, to convince him that on-line hate was a significant enough problem to warrant AIPAC expending some resources to combat it. AIPAC was completely unaware of the hate being spread on-line.
