ACA Selling My Life Away
I get a lot of junk mail. As a result, I end up spending a part of each day reading these emails only to discover they’re spam and need to be deleted. I find that a lot of this spam is related to crystallography. Most of these emails tend to use my first and middle name in an attempt to appear more personal. Many of my good friends don’t even know my middle name so, naturally, I wondered how these companies were able to attain not only that information, but my email address as well.
If you just take a look around, as I did, you’ll be able to connect the dots (ACA email list rates (pdf))
The ACA is selling your personal information to various companies and organizations.
True, they’re not breaking any rules in choosing to do this, but every time I am sent an email from one of these companies, I lose a little respect for them. Mainly, because it is clear that they are not respecting my time.
Surely, a company needs to advertise but sending out spam to everyone is not the way to do it. If you don’t believe me then maybe Seth will be able to convince you.
What to do?
1) Make the email personal: “I really liked your blog post on XYZ and thought you might be interested in…” (make an effort)
2) Engage, contribute, interact. I don’t know Peter from Emerald Biosystems, but would love to meet him. The company engages the community (is attending ACA this year), contributes (via their own blog) and interacts (writes thoughtful comments)
Despite your best efforts…
…its still spam.
How is one supposed to know if they have receive this message in error?
Sadly, the only suggestion I’m given to fix this is to waste more of my time. I have to write them a blog post email asking them to stop sending me mail I never asked for in the first place.
Note: I won’t be buying your used Rigaku machine but it’s nice to see you’ve kept your options open (here, here, here, here, here, here, here).
Sean
September 15th, 2009 at 1:59 PM #
I just got another email from Erin, some people just don’t get it.