OK, here’s a question: What do you do when an ostensibly professional company keeps spamming you and you have politely asked them to stop and they don’t? When it appears that they simply can’t be bothered to remove you from their list?
This is the situation I find myself in with Pixelfish.
Pixelfish does some kind of video creation and processing and some months ago, to promote their services, they decided in their corporate wisdom that spamming was the way to go about it.
Now there are a few ways I distinguish spamming from reasonable promotional messages. The key ones are when the messages aren’t CAN SPAM compliant, when I can’t get off the list, and when I get the same message on multiple accounts. This is exactly what Pixelfish have done. Out of curiosity I even called them to find out how they think of what they are doing and spoke to someone called Dave Brewer who obviously didn’t care and hasn’t done anything about my complaints.
The problem with enforcing the CAN SPAM law is that the FTC seems to be only capable of going after the big guys – the true bulk mailers – rather than the hundreds of small businesses that use similar tactics. This isn’t unreasonable as the problem has reached such a scale where it is only practical to go after the worst offenders.
Ignoring the likes of Pixelfish is what many people suggest (along with smug questions as to whether my delete key still works) but that misses the point. If we ignore the bad behavior of outfits like Pixelfish then more and more businesses will use the same tactics simply because they can and because everyone else is doing it. Ignoring it rewards and reinforces bad, antisocial behavior and will eventually make it the norm.
So, what do I do? Or rather what do “we” do?
