Did I Sign up to Mailpepper? I don't think so!

January 24th 2006

If there is one type of spam that annoys me more than anything, it's so-called "opt-in" permission  based spam.

Some companies out there genuinely want you to believe that people, and lots of them, would honesty want to sign up to receive spam. Do you? I don't.

Like me, you've probably seen the flaw in their business model. Mailpepper is one of these companies that offers so-called "opt-in" marketing mail.

I've started receiving their "communications" recently, and funny that, I don't remember signing up to receive spam.

So one of three things has happend.

1) They have stolen the info@ address from this website.
2) They have bought my email address from another email spam list merchant.
3) Someone else has signed up on my behalf (thanks!)

That last one is important - firstly because it's not very likely (most of my friends are not 12), and secondly because it's turned into the greatest excuse that these "opt-in" spammers use to hide behind for any bad publicity about junk on their lists.

Quite simply, they can say when asked "Oh, someone else must have signed you up maliciously" - and use that to avoid revealing the true source of my email address (which I suspect was bought from a list). I have asked them for the source of my email address, and await their response.

In the meantime, if Mailpepper changed their systems to do a confirmed opt-in (where they sent one email to the address which required some kind of confirmation to activate the address on the list), then I would have a great deal more respect for them. But of course, then they wouldn't be able to add people without their permission and get away with it!

UPDATE
I love the beautiful irony in the adverts that Google has associated with this page. It's up to you to decide whether to click them or not!