Category: email spam

Email, email spam

SpamArrest sucks!

I had a lead for a guy today. I sent him an email to tell him so and to put him in touch with the potential client.

I received back a Spamarrest email asking me to click on a link to verify that I am not a spammer. A pain in the ass, after all I am doing this guy a favour, but ok I’ll click it. I then have to click another link on the page which opens up and when I do that, I am presented with this CAPTCHA screen to fill out. Guys, CAPTCHAs are evil. Stop using them. Now.

SpamArrest sucks

Forget it!

I hate spam but I also hate people who are too damn lazy to put a proper anti-spam solution in place and instead throw the burden back on the email sender.

Email, email spam

EmailCloud nukes my (email) spam

Ross Cooney of Rozmic contacted me recently to tell me of their latest product, EmailCloud.

EmailCloud is a server-side anti-(email)spam application which is accessible and configurable through a browser. The setup wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped (I messed it up!) but a quick email to Rozmic and I had the solution back in minutes!

As you can see from the stats below, up to 75% of the emails I get are spam! However, because EmailCloud is server side, my email client never sees those emails saving me bandwidth and hassle.

Rozmic Email Stats

The great thing about EmailCloud is that, being a hosted app, you can simply set it and forget it.

[Full disclosure – Ross set me up with a free EmailCloud account so I could try it out.]

Email, email spam

Monster apologise

I received a phone call this morning from James Mailley, the Sales Director of Monster.ie. James is John Burns’ boss.

James was extremely apologetic about what happened over the last couple of days and said he would like to email me a formal letter of apology.

I told him that I would publish the letter of apology on the blog and he was happy with that. Here is the email I received:

Hi Tom,

Thanks for taking my call this morning – I appreciate you taking further time to discuss the recent events with me.

As I said on the phone and wish to reiterate, I apologise for the issues surrounding the e-mail that was distributed and also for the amount of your time being spent dealing with this situation. Having thoroughly investigated all the aspects of the original mail, I have discovered that this was an error that occurred through the enthusiasm of a brand new recruit who did not understand the policies and practices of the company.

Monster has a strict policy regarding unsolicited emails, and all Monster employees are forbidden from sending such emails unless the individuals or companies in question have specifically opted in to receive group emails of this nature. I reiterate that the email in question was sent by an individual in contravention of Monster’s policy on unsolicited emails, and that Monster in no way authorised or condoned this behaviour.

On behalf of Monster please be assured that we will do everything we can to avoid incidents of this nature occurring again in the future.

Kind regards

James

James Mailley
Sales Director
http://www.monster.ie

James was also looking for suggestions on how to make this right. I made a couple of suggestions to him which he promised to look into but if anyone else has any suggestions they’d like to add, feel free to leave them in the comments or email them to me and I’ll pass them onto James.