These days it is a generally accepted practice that it should be simple for email recipients to unsubscribe from an email they have received. It is not only the right thing to do, but it is good business practice.

How many times in the past have you been left with a dim view of a company that has continued to email you after you have asked to be removed? Lots I’d guess, but thankfully it is much less common than it used to be and most legitimate email senders obey your requests if not straight away, then within a few days.

Some email senders to not seem to be able to grasp this though and either take too long, or actually ignore your requests, to the point where I was just hitting the ‘spam’ button on my email client (together with thousands of other people I’d guess) which is giving them a bad reputation with the ISP’s and risking their email actually getting blocked.

BT was one such offender and they took about 3 months to actually stop sending me emails. What was worse was that the tone of their emails (and letters) was condescending and was essentially saying that my current deal was rubbish, and I was stupid for not going with them! Okay those words weren’t used but that’s how it made me feel!

The second offender is the Pipeline Card, which if you don’t know was set up about 5 years ago with the aim of offering discounts at big petrol retailers. Unfortunately, they never came good on their promise and now just email you with you with little bits of news about ‘discussions continuing’ with the retailers, but mainly with lots of links to their energy price comparison site. Trying to unsubscribe from this obvious spam email gets you nowhere, and they keep on coming. Will the retailers get together with this outfit now? Of course they won’t. They wouldn’t want to be associated with it.

Anyway, rant over, but if you haven’t read it already, here is another shocking peice of unsubscribe madness from the archives: Just complete these 46 fields to unsubscribe.