Tuesday, May 13, 2008

And the winner is ...

A while back I decided I was getting too much mail on the Yahoo account -- technical stuff mostly, the majority of which I recall asking for -- just too much of it. These days, almost all reputable mail comes with unsubscribe options, and usually it works. Within a few days I'd trimmed the size of my daily inbox by half ...

Two stubborn emailers remain. TheLadders.com is a job search site that, 1-1/2 years ago, I signed up on for email alerts for CTO job listings. I figured I wouldn't get too many -- CTO jobs don't come up that often. And indeed, TheLadders almost never sends me CTO jobs. What they do send me is a daily ream of crap, including super helpful job listings that don't include the word "CTO" ...

Dear Dan,
We're sorry, but your CTO saved search isn’t yielding any job results at this time. It may be that your search criteria are very specific, and the results limited. If you’d like to generate more job leads, we recommend modifying your search criteria or saving a new, broader search.

To keep your search moving, here are a few jobs you might like. If these are of interest to you, you might consider adding criteria for jobs like these to your saved searches.

A superb idea, if I wanted to look at ads for Senior R&D Software Engineers, Wireless Mac Designers, Bluetooth Software Engineers, Mobility Consultants, and Graphics Programmer [Senior Level] -- all of which they sent me today, none of which I ever asked for.

Another good idea is, they could send me email only when the saved job search shows up. They don't. They send me a piece of spam daily ... and have no way for me to unsubscribe, as far as I can tell. In today's email there's a nice graphic that asks:



This is a special service, I take it, possibly just for me, permitting them to increase the number of jobs-I-don't-want in my inbox, every single day, by an entire order of magnitude. I bet they make you pay for it, though.

As awful as TheLadders is, they weren't close to being the winner. The winner by a runaway ... is TechTarget.com.

TechTarget, I have to say, gives you an unsubscribe button. And I've used it. A lot.

Here's what I've unsubscribed to so far from TechTarget:

- SearchWinIT.com Updates on new site content
- SearchWindowsSecurity.com Vulnerabilities/Authentication tips for W...
- SearchSQLServer.com Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
- TechTarget: Editorial Surveys
- SearchWinDevelopment.com White Paper Alerts
- SearchWindowsSecurity.com Windows IT Downloads
- SearchWinComputing.com Servers
- SearchWindowsSecurity.com White Paper Alerts
- SearchOracle.com Oracle Database Administration
- SearchDataManagement.com White Paper Alerts
- SearchWinComputing.com Updates on new site content
- SearchOracle.com Updates on new site content
- SearchDataManagement.com Updates on new site content
- SearchSQLServer.com Webcast Alert
- SearchSQLServer.com Development
- SearchWinComputing.com Storage and Storage Management
- SearchWindowsSecurity.com Webcast Alert
- SearchWinComputing.com White Paper Alerts
- SearchDataManagement.com Webcast Alert
- SearchWinIT.com Today's News
- SearchWinIT.com White Paper Alerts
- SearchSQLServer.com White Paper Alerts
- SearchOracle.com Webcast Alert
- SearchSQLServer.com Performance and Tuning
- SearchWinComputing.com Webcast Alert
- SearchWinDevelopment.com Windows Development Essentials

I have unsubscribed at this point from at least 26 TechTarget emails ... since I started hanging onto the unsubscribe confirmation emails. And still they come, new categories of whitepapers, alerts, special articles, flaming ice cream ... two new emails just today. So:

Congratulations to TechTarget.com, Winner of the Inaugural Annual 2008 Brass Envelope Award, awarded by Daniel Keys Moran to the company that's most thoroughly insulted "my infinite patience and understanding."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dan,
For "The Ladders", you can logon to their site and manage your email alerts. That's the only way I found to unsubscribe. Can't help with the TechSearch though.

BSP said...

Interestingly enough, Yahoo!tech just had an article about how Spam "turned 30" this month. It was pretty interesting, not least of which was because I think my Dad used to work with the protospammer named in the article at DEC back in the day.

BTW, I wouldn't use their unsubscribe link, just use your spam filter. All the unsubscribe link does is tell them the addy is actively accessed.

On a related old-computer stuff note, next time you're in Denver, wanna see crazy supercomputers, new and old at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder? They have a Cray-2 -pushes nerd glasses to bridge of nose-