YesPleez? No Thankz! - "Opt-In" Spammers

August 29th 2006

Yet again one of these so-called "permission-based advertisers" has been making themselves at home in my mailbox, without my consent.

I spoke to them earlier in this year by email, and they assured me they would sort things out - but they haven't. These people - YesPleeez, Web-clubs.co.uk and various other associated sites - are using harvested emails and sending out spam to these under the protection of the Data Protection act.

They're acting with relative impunity in sending out these unsolicited emails whilst at the same time pretending to give a respectable marketing face to major advertisers.

I never opted in. When I click on the link in their unsolicited email to update my details, it says my name is "Ch Juni" - some automatically generated nonsense.

So.. How do they get away with it?

Simple. They claim that they never send unsolicited emails, that they obtained my details from a website "that adheres to the Data Protection Act of 1998 and have accepted to receive third-party marketing communication."

So this is how it works. Someone creates a spam list by trawling through webpages and stealing addresses (that's the ONLY way they got the info@mways address which is never used elsewhere) and then sells it to YesPleez claiming it's legitimate.

YesPleez obviously made no attempt to check the validity of these addreses - in fact they have readded my address to their database even though I was unsubscribed several months ago - so even an unsubscription from YesPleez doesn't seem to work.

I have no problem with permission-based advertising as a concept (except that I don't think anyone in their right mind actually signs up for it - most people who have signed up for it have misread a form or ticked/not ticked a box when they meant to). But companies like this are hiding behind a sham of respectability when their actual business practices are highly dubious at best.

CLEAN UP YOUR ACT - It's very simple YesPleez - send everyone who subscribes to you an email that states:

a) where you got their details from b) what details you have on them

And a link to click to confirm the details. If they don't click on the link, don't send them any further mails.

What's most important is that you then produce a clean list that's far more valuable for marketing folk - a list of people who are actually interested in receiving your mails, rather than the vast majority who will delete it without opening. Ok, it will probably only be about six people, but it's still the *honest* way to do this.

I doubt we'll see anything like this happening in the future - YesPleez will continue to send out emails without a care.

NOTE: 12th May 2008. Nearly two years after posting this, Lawyers on behalf of YesPleez have been in contact to my web host asking them to take down this site because they dislike this page. I have apparently until the 19th to comply. Now, I have given them the opportunity to put the record straight, to explain how the issues I described happened and what steps they have taken to prevent re-occurrence of it. I can say that I haven't seen any more of these emails to any of my accounts in the last 18 months, so perhaps they have improved their system. I suspect that some 'affiliate' was deceiving them and passing on emails that they should not have - perhaps this has been sorted in which case I'll be VERY glad to report so here.

I have no desire to deliberately cause problems for this company, and when I hear some positive news I'll report it here.