Friday, January 29, 2021

Unsubscribe Day on February 8th

lake view under blue sky with mountains in the background
Irrelevant pic from last summer bcuz its January
I know from my days of working in IT that you should mostly just ignore spam and robocalls. Tighten up your spam rules, or use a provider that has spam blocking, and then ignore whatever gets through. 

Here's the reason: spammers buy a database of email addresses or phone numbers, and the information may be months or years old. The spammers have no way of knowing which phone numbers/email addresses lead to a real live person, and which ones are dead ends that are a waste of their time.  

So if you answer the phone, or reply to an email, they know they've got a working, functional contact. That immediately moves you to a different list, a list that they can then re-sell to someone else for more money because these are numbers/addresses that actually work. 

You see the problem. I no longer answer the phone unless I recognize the caller ID. If it's someone that legitimately needs to talk to me, they'll leave a message-- and I'd say more than 90% of the time, there's no message, just a hang-up. If I'm going to be home during the day, I even turn off the ringer (we are one of the seven households in the country that still has a landline.)

That has worked pretty well for the phone. Everyone once in awhile we'll get a day or two of frequent robocalls (and of course, during the election season, it was ridiculous), but if we don't answer, the calls tail off and we're good again for a few weeks. 

But over time, my email situation has become ugly. Once, about ten years ago, we contributed a fairly small amount to an acquaintance's political campaign. We immediately started receiving daily emails, and then several a day, and then a dozen. Not just from that candidate, but from his party, and then from various PACs (fundraising organizations) as my address got passed around. I've never contributed another dime to a political campaign. 

But then even weirder-- somehow my address was passed to "the other guys." I guess they figure everyone in Montana wants mail from gun rights groups and conservative PACs. It got way worse. Last spring, after the primaries, I got sick of seeing all the absurdly overblown subject lines (from both sides, honestly), and I thought at least I needed to get rid of the conservative ones. So I went through and unsubscribed.

(aside: by law, every mass email has to include an unsubscribe link. It may be in tiny print down at the bottom, but it has to be there.)

Unsubscribing worked great for a day or two. But before long, I was getting double the number of emails from the Democrats. Not kidding. There's some kind of sharing going on there. And then within a couple of months, I started getting the conservative ones again ("Dear fellow conservative, help me fight the FAR LEFT TAKEOVER OF OUR COUNTRY").

It is a little better since the election-- for whatever reason, I'm down to 3-4 messages from the left and 6-8 from the right. But it's still really IRRITATING. So, that's why I'm having unsubscribe day on Feb 8th. 

Well, that and also I need to unsubscribe from the previously mentioned trial periods I never cancelled. For example-- I kept a list for a couple of years of Kindle Unlimited titles I wanted to read (Kindle Unlimited has hundreds of thousands of titles that are available for "free" if you pay $9.99/month). When I got up to a dozen, I signed up for the free month. The problem is, six months later, I've only read one or two-- and for the $60 I've spent, I could have bought those two plus three or four others. Thus: Unsubscribe day on February 8th. Since I've told you about it, now I have to do it.

I think this qualifies as MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW. Here's to my dream: Spam- and robocall-free living.

I'm going to start posting once a week, probably on Fridays. Twice a week feels like too much. 

have a great weekend!

1 comment:

KarenB said...

Happy Unsubscribe Day!