I LOVE what Chris Anderson did!
I have been hounded by PR ‘tards ever since this blog started generating real traffic. (See PR Weenies: Go Away!)
So it is with great pleasure that I am pointing to Wired’s Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson, who went postal on a group of PR ‘tards who have been inundating him with crap email:
So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I
know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what
I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love
those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public).Everything else gets banned on first abuse.
The following is just the last month’s list of people and companies who
have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me
something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them
sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list
without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being
published here, so be it–turnabout is fair play.There is no getting off this list. If you’re on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.
He also lists ALL of their email addresses, for the benefit of email spam harvesters.. . . tee hee
Somehow I doubt the interns or recent english major graduates who are sending out these emails are going to care.
While I have the utmost sympathy for the recipients of vast numbers of unsolicited and unwanted email, and contempt for the senders thereof, I have a serious problem with the remedy proposed.
Anderson intentionally made his email public, and had to be aware that in doing so he’d attract unwanted messages. Rather than simply replying with a boilerplate pss-off message, he’s exposing offenders (arbitrarily defined) emails to the public.
Repeat offenders may warrant such treatment, but certainly not first offenders.
I wonder if the group listed is certifiable as a class?
Be careful posting something like that. It’s pretty trivial for an email address to get spoofed. Now that you’ve published what you do, some one could spoof a legit email address that you might like, with email content you don’t like, and you end up blocking them.
Afraid I’ve got to disagree a tad with those here and on Andersen’s blog who point out the spam dangers.
Fascinating and excellent on several fronts.
While I take the point of several commentors about making these folks spam-exposed sobeit :) !
There’s two other strategic points that are ven more interesting.
1) you’ve just published a list of PR folks and contacts that don’t earn their money by properly researching their targets. Wonder what that does for their business models ? It certainly tells us who not to use.
2) Which leads to the larger question of why don’t they invest in building up a targeted list of high alignment targets. Such a database would take time and effort but it would be accumulating more and more valuable contact information. It would, in other words, be an appreciating asset and yield major strategic returns.
Bravo Zulu
I am a little amazed that people whose line of business is publishing news are surprised and/or annoyed by the fact that they get pursued by people who want to tell them news.
It’s part of the job. An annoying part, I’ll totally agree, but it’s more of an occupational hazard than anything else.
I regularly get calls and emails from companies trying to sell me various business services, most of which I don’t want. I don’t like the interruption, but it doesn’t give me the right to post their contact information on the Internet and invite the world to spam them. They’re just doing their job.
People need to chill. Has anyone looked at the list? Half of the addresses aren’t ones that anyone answer. They are those auto-sender things that are used for mass emails.
In Outlook, I just banned the “Free Financial Planning from BS co.” spam emails from my own HR department.
It felt good.
Waste of motor truckin’ time… You are fighting a war you can only lose.
And, worse… you’re making it personal… a challenge to the masses, and they are way smarter and vindictive – than you have time for warfare against them.
…Never call an opposing linebacker a motor trucker just before the play.
–Eclectic-san
PR people go on the “B” ark. And if you don’t know what that is, don’t bother emailing me!
E-mail spam is annoying for sure, but it sure beats someone randomly walking up to me on the street and asking me if I would like to know how to increase the size of my penis and then hands me a flyer and runs away.
If the Fed does cut today, after the GDP data, the market will eventually come to the understanding that “it”, not the Fed, has been appointed to look after inflation. It will also intuitively understand that inflation is detrimental to its health in the long run. Over the next few weeks, the market will start to react to inflatiion, not necessarily the doctored data, much as it would react to a Fed statement. In other words, the Fed will have made itself irrelevant. Bernanke may become the new Arthur Burns with his unfortunate relationship to the Nixon White House.