November 17, 2009

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.

Honda Village obtained my email address when I sent them a message through their Web site on October 15, 2009. Here is the exact content of that message:

(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.

This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.

Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.

As you can see, I clearly and unequivocally told Honda Village NOT TO PUT ME ON ANY SPAM LISTS, and yet that is exactly what they have done. Here’s what has transpired since then:

• October 17, 2009 – I received a “Did you get my info” form sales email from Alex Stoyanov, which I ignored since it was obviously irrelevant to what I had written to Honda Village about.
• October 18, 2009 – I received a “The best use of your time” form sales email from Alex Stoyanov, which I (again) ignored since was (again) obviously irrelevant to what I had written to Honda Village about.
• January 3, 2010 – I received a “Your Honda Service Reminder” email from honda@reminder.honda.com, i.e., the same spam that you had previously been sending to my wife’s address as outlined in my previous letter. I immediately unsubscribed by clicking on the link in the email.
• January 4, 2010 – I received a “Valuable Honda Service Offers” email from homda@reminder.honda.com. When I clicked on the link to unsubscribe, it informed me that I was already unsubscribed! Isn’t it remarkable that Honda can continue to send me email messages from which I’ve supposedly already unsubscribed?
• February 22, 2010 – I received another “Valuable Honda Service Offers” email. Once again, when I clicked on the link to unsubscribe, it informed me that I already was.

In short, Honda Village started spamming me when I clearly and unequivocally told them not to, and they are continuing to spam me over a month and a half after I told their automated system to unsubscribe me and their system confirmed that I was, in fact, unsubscribed.

All of this spamming my wife and me against our will is a direct violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act.

You forced me to waste an hour of my time writing my last letter to get you to stop spamming my wife, and now you’ve forced me to waste another hour of my time writing this letter to get you to stop spamming me.

To be blunt, what is WRONG with you people?!

MAKE THE SPAM STOP. NOW. AND MAKE SURE IT NEVER STARTS UP AGAIN. EVER.

CC: E. Peter Mullane, Esq.

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.

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.

Today, I am forced to condemn the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to the charity spammers’ hall of shame.

AFB spammed me in December 2007 after I gave them my email address when donating on-line.  I sent them email, asked them to stop sending me bulk email, and informed them that if they did not do so, I would have no choice but to remove them from the list of organizations I support.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again in August 2008.  I complained again.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again later that month.  I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again in January 2009.  I filed a complaint through SpamCop.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again in June 2009.  I followed the instructions in the spam for unsubscribing and again complained through SpamCop.  They did not respond.

They spammed me again today, with the same unsubscribe instructions (i.e., the instructions that I followed last time but obviously did not work) in their message.

After I publish this blog posting, I will be once again asking them to unsubscribe, this time in an email message sent to every single email address on their Web site’s “contact us” page which will include a link to my blog.  I will also once again be filing a complaint through SpamCop.  I’m not holding out much hope that any of this will actually work.

Either the people who run this organization are monumentally incompetent, or they think it’s completely OK to spam their donors, ignore unsubscribe requests, and publish unsubscribe instructions that don’t actually do anything.  Reputable organizations do not act this way.  Organizations which act this way cannot be relied upon to use wisely the funds entrusted to them by donors.  I therefore strongly urge people to find somewhere else to send their charity dollars.

UPDATE: I received the following response from AFB 41 minutes after I sent my email to everyone on their “contact us” page and told them I had outed them on my blog:

Be assured you will be removed today and will no longer receive emails from AFB. We recently discovered a glitch in our email list updating function that re-added unsubscribe and wrong addresses. I am pleased to report that we have fixed that error and now once a donor asks to be removed they will be removed forever.

My apologies that it took us a while to figure out the problem.

I leave it to my readers to decide for themselves whether this is an adequate response or “too little too late.”  Personally, I’m going to go with the latter.