$#&* your newsletter!

I just received yet another unasked for newsletter by e-mail. It was from a company that has a product I think is pretty good and the newsletter started with the following spiel from the vice president of marketing:

"Welcome to our fall issue of [newsletter name]. We hope you enjoyed every moment of summer as it swept by. On my morning run last week, I felt the crisp air and was reminded that fall is well on its way.

As always, with a change of seasons comes fresh beginnings. As the school year starts, some of the excitement of a new year still rubs off on us as adults. So when the leaves turn and the temperatures fall, we sometimes feel that we have a fresh start in our worlds e-amil

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I just received yet another unasked for newsletter by e-mail. It was from a company that has a product I think is pretty good and the newsletter started with the following spiel from the vice president of marketing:

"Welcome to our fall issue of [newsletter name]. We hope you enjoyed every moment of summer as it swept by. On my morning run last week, I felt the crisp air and was reminded that fall is well on its way.

As always, with a change of seasons comes fresh beginnings. As the school year starts, some of the excitement of a new year still rubs off on us as adults. So when the leaves turn and the temperatures fall, we sometimes feel that we have a fresh start in our worlds e-amil

[Company name] is excited to present a fresh perspective on [product name]. In this issue of [newsletter name], we will talk about the new option for purchasing [product name] - as a hosted solution."

I quote all of this because it illustrates the kind of newsletter that companies like subscribing me to without asking. I am totally pissed off with these involuntary subscriptions! It's bad enough to get more gunge in my inbox, but when that gunge is irritating . . . well, it makes you want to hurt someone.

These newsletters almost never contain anything of value. They are almost always smug, chatty, self-congratulatory, irrelevant and boring, boring, boring.

Even more aggravating are the newsletters that include, as this one did, explanations such as, "When you subscribe to the [newsletter name], you can be assured that your e-mail address will not be sold to third parties by [company name]." Isn't that nice of them?

To add insult to their stupidity, the swines make me send a reply to them or follow some link to get off their lists.

I have had it. The following memo is to all the companies that decide to subscribe me to their newsletters:

Dear Whoever Subscribed Me,

You people must be daft. I just received your latest newsletter and the most obvious message in it is that you are idiots. You talk about my subscription, but the problem is I didn't subscribe - you did it to me. Without asking.

So, for the third or fourth time today I have to follow a link to some site to unsubscribe to yet another lame, useless newsletter I couldn't give a dang about.

We all know that you want to get some kind of communication going with your existing and potential customers and we all understand that that is a tough thing to do. The problem is that unless your product runs our pacemakers or protects us from avian flu or meteor strikes we don't care. Really. We don't.

Do you think that given the gazillion news sources we have at our disposal and the hundreds of products and scores of systems we deal with, not to mention actually having lives outside of the computer world, the drivel in your newsletter is actually useful?

You are just making yourselves part of the irritating background noise of the 'Net, degrading the value of our e-mail and annoying us to no end.

You want to build lines of communication? Build them into your products. If we're using your products make sure that they inform us (in a non-irritating way) that new upgrades and services are available.