One of my (few) pet peeves is getting emails from people with the canned Plaxo message.
I received another one just this morning:
I’m updating my address book. Please take a moment to update me with your latest contact info.
Thanks,
[Name]
P.S. I’ve attached my current information in a vcard. If you get Plaxo too, we can stay connected without the hassle of sending emails back and forth.
I’d say I’ve received 20 such requests during the past three months, some from people I have never met nor know, each one exactly the same.
While I find such mass email contact mostly irritating – they indicate that you’re just a name on an impersonal email distribution: no personal connection there at all, a bit like those canned LinkedIn requests – what really gets my goat is this final line in each of those impersonal emails:
If you do not wish to receive update request emails from [Name], click here to opt-out.
Opt out? I never opted in! Or does just being in someone’s Plaxo contact list mean they assume I did? That’s pretty sharp spam practice.
So it was interesting to read via Techdirt and via Jeremy Wagstaff that Plaxo are now “no longer aggressively pushing new users to send out e-mails and are adding restrictions to prevent existing users from sending out large batches,” according to a post by Todd Masonis, one of the company’s founders.
Whatever the reason – whether it’s because of Plaxo’s growth or not – this is good news. If it means no more Plaxo emails at all, even better news.
(When writing this post, I couldn’t decide which existing category to assign it to. So I created a new one – the spam category.)
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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
