It’s not every day someone threatens you with lawyers …
April 16, 2007
Yesterday I got an nasty email from a company (lets call them F), based here in Germany. I had purchase a product from F some time at the end of 2006, and I think they have an opt in email list on purchasing a product, which is checked automatically.
Granted there were problem with the order and I complained but didn’t even receive an apology. So in January I started to get emails from about their service times etc. I sent an email asking them to be removed from the mailings but sadly they continued, they don’t have an opt out link or details in their emails, so I guess sending a reply stating that they shouldn’t email me again would be fine.
Yesterday I had a bit of time on my hands, and when I got yet another email from F, I decided to forward it to spamcop (www.spamcop.net). I considered it SPAM under the Article 13(1) (Paragraph 2) of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive [here]. So I replied to the email address stating what I did, and the at around 8pm last night I get a call, thankfully I didn’t answer it. But it was the owner or a worker of F who said “I know who you are, you an an ex-customer of ours, I want to know why you did what you did, you will be hearing from our lawyers if any damage is done, etc…”. Fine I can see why someone is annoyed, but they clearly missed the whole point of why I had reported them. They even sent me an email, stating the thing about the lawyers once again. So I explained why I had considered it SPAM and told them to contact my family lawyers (back in Cork) in all further correspondence.
The funny thing in all this is how someone thinks that they can threaten to sue me for damages after then sent SPAM. Also when someone starts to mention lawyers, I am no longer playing around. I would have take the time to explain it properly to them and maybe what they should do in future. But now that they say the L word, I am no longer interested in helping them, I did point them to the reference I quoted above. Hopefully that will keep them busy for awhile and maybe they will even update their policy for sending mailings.
See it’s not always good to feel wanted 
Doing some web work
April 6, 2007
Happy Good Friday folks !
Today has been a day of software upgrades. I use wordress (www.wordpress.org) on all of my blog sites [1],[2],[3] & [4] and another one I’ve kept a secret as it’s far from being ready ;). As well as doing some work for some other clients I’ve been pretty busy, with that and the day job
I also bought my first (2) dot.ie domains, for up and coming ideas I have. So I think my latest fury of going from 2 domain names to 6, should keep me busy for a bit.
[1] was on 2.0.x version of wordpress, and I decided to bring it up to take to take advantage of the new auto-saving feature for posts.
[4] was in need of a bit of an upgrade, I think it was on version 1.5.x of wordpress and with the new features of the AntiSpam from Akismet, maybe it will help to do a better job. So far [4] has received over 13k spam comments and trackbacks, hopefully this will decrease, as I also added Bad-Behaviour to bring up the defence again bots registering.