I’ve had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn’t spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it’s PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers (that’s editor@wired.com).So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public).
You gotta read some of the comments! There are 2 types; the first are PR people, some of whom are on the list and the second seem to be people in the same boat as Anderson congratulating him for what he has done…
Anyway reading some of the ethical and moral twists that some of the PR group of respondants have come up with is almost laughable and some of them almost make you feel sorry for them. (until you realise what they are up to)
One of the points made amongst the comments is about the lack of regulation amongst mailing lists, how many times have you found yourself on a mailing list that you wanted to get off, and discovered that removing yourself from that list is rather like trying to clean your house using the just the powers of your mind (Yeah I am supposed to be cleaning my house as we have people coming round tomorrow to look at our spare room).
Why does it take week to be removed from the list, does someone actually have to manually remove you from the list? I work as a web developer and there is one code snippet everyone should know:
DELETE FROM table WHERE row = '$delete'
That didn’t take a week did it?
Anderson’s response to the comments of his post can be found here
Lawrence Jones (my MD) regularly blogs about online Marketing and PR and has an excellent 3 step guide to getting the best out of your web presence
I always wondered about that too. They act like removal from a list is some huge process with dozens of servers and databases that have to do some crazy amount of processing and synchronization. They probably just say that so you won’t get mad if you get another email from them. I’ve got so sick of all these mailing lists lately I’ve got myself removed from most of them. Too much noise for me to get any use from it any more.
I have built many bulk emailing systems for clients before, and I just can’t fathom why every PR company claims it will take 24 hours to be removed from their lists? Why? do they make them on notepads?