In the last three days I have received 3 mails from Colorbar, a “lively private club for colorful people”. The first one didn’t trigger my suspicion, since I am subscribed to some music-related mailing lists. The two next mails came for 2 @forret.com aliases of which I am certain they never subscribed to any list. So I took a closer look at the email. No contact details are given, no indication of where the email addresses came from, no possibility to unsubscribe, i.e. it’s a spam mail. To be even more specific: a belgian spam message.
The domain is registered by Ludo Smits, owner of gay discotheque Red & Blue in Antwerp. Colorbar seems to be “a gay friendly concept @ Red&Blue”. Whatever. I’m quite sure I never subscribed to Colorbar’s nor Red&Blue’s mailinglist with any of those three addresses. So, mr. Smits, where did you get my email addresses? And if you insist on doing email marketing, could you at least be professional and put a link to the Colorbar unsubscribe page in every mail you send?
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And mister Smits (had it been Smith, it could have been anyone
), it’s colour bar. And what do they mean by gay friendly: Is that mixed?
What I usually do when I get spammed by Belgian companies is send an email to the domain owner, in which I point them to the “Law regarding certain judicial aspects of the services of the information society” dated March 11, 2003. (See http://www.privacycommission.be/publications/loi-wet_11-3-03.pdf (in Dutch)) .
The key article in this law is #14. It states (my translation): “It is forbidden send electronic mail messages for commercial purposes without the prior, free, and informed consent of the addressee of these messages”.
Tell them explicitly that they have commited a crime by sending that email, and ask them to remove your email address from their mailing lists and confirm that removal back to you.
Also, tell them in no uncertain terms that if you receive more emails from them, you’ll notify the “Commissie voor de bescherming van de persoonlijke levenssfeer” and the “Federale Overheidsdienst Economie, KMO, Middenstand en Energie”.
Up to now, I’ve had a 100% success rate (sometimes even with a “Sorry, we didn’t know that” message back).
An added bonus is also some personal gratification that you finally got back at a spammer, even if it’s only one
@Mike:
It’s one of those puh-tay-to, puh-tah-to things. ‘Colour’ is British spelling, ‘color’ is American.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_differences#-our_.2F_-or
Peter,
exactly! That’s why colour is correct and color isn’t
Next thing you’ll know ‘leverage’ will be a verb…
have to say I unsubscribed already 5 times from Mine.be… You think it stopped them from sending me mails?
So… Unsubscribe policy is not always working.