Here’s a novel twist on spam: Send a newsletter, and instead of a simple “Click here to stop receiving these,” require that the user send a detailed e-mail. And then refuse to accept the message.
That’s what the American Chemical Society does. I am getting its Chemistry.org newsletter. I do not want this newsletter. The instructions for unsubscribing are to write to webmaster@acs.org, ask to be unsubscribed, give your full name, and give your chemistry.org login name.
Uh-huh. (Having worked at the ACS, I can tell you firsthand that it’s far, far from the technology cutting edge.)
So I do this. I send the following note to webmaster@acs.org:
Please cancel my subscription to the chemistry.org newsletter. My e-mail
address is [I put my address here] and my full name is Andrew Kantor. I don’t have
a login name.
Thanks.
The message bounced back with the following error:
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:webmaster@acs.org
SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data:
host boron.acs.org [216.143.112.9]: 550 5.7.1 Blocked by SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin, huh? Neat trick — use SpamAssassin as an excuse to continue sending unwanted mail. I gotta try that. (I sent the e-mail again from a different address. Same bounce.)
The ACS makes millions of dollars every year in a great scam: It sells universities scientific journals that contain papers written by their own professors. (Most are federally funded, so the ACS gets millions of your tax dollars for itself by selling people their own work. Amazing!) And yet, it can’t afford the staff to get its mail servers to work properly?
Follow-up: I got another unwanted spam from the ACS. This time I pasted “webmaster@acs.org” into the BCC field a few dozen times and sent it back. That finally got their attention and they unsubscribed me.
