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Can a company legally send you a message asking you to resubscribe?

7 points by dangero ↗ HN
I just received this email from Microsoft: "Did you know your current contact settings have cancelled all Microsoft email communications to your inbox? We'd like to encourage you to re-subscribe so you won't miss out on any of our great content and resources to help you and your organization realize its full potential. Opt-in to receive the latest information from Microsoft — all it takes is one click. If the content you receive is not to your liking, you can opt back out at any time."

Isn't that the kind of email that anti spam laws are supposed to protect against given that I already unsubscribed?

8 comments

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lutusp
> Isn't that the kind of email that anti spam laws are supposed to protect against given that I already unsubscribed?

When a correspondent disregards your wish to unsubscribe, it's only a violation of Can-Spam if that entity had no prior relationship with you. And even then a correspondent can claim not to have received your unsubscribe order.

The truth is Can-Spam offers almost no protection at all, in a practical sense. There are too many loopholes and gotchas.

The best thing you can do is what you're doing -- publicize your experience, hope that adverse publicity will change their behavior.

Someone
You can't both claim not to have received the unsubscribe order and write "Did you know your current contact settings have cancelled all Microsoft email communications to your inbox?"

So, at he very least, that is impolite. I think the way to act is to send out a conformation message that includes an invitation to return: "you are now unsubscribed from all our email messages. If you want to change that in the future, do..."

But of course, you should only do that very shortly after the unsubscribe, not weeks later and certainly not months later (I don't know how much time elapsed in this case, so I might just be a poorly worded confirmation/reinvitation)

dangero
I think I unsubscribed years ago actually.
eurleif
I received the same email, and wondered the same. The email itself also didn't contain an unsubscribe link; wouldn't that violate CAN-SPAM, if nothing else?
dangero
I know! If nothing else, it's REALLY BAD PR. No other company has ever done this to me. Leave it to some manager at Microsoft to OK this.
dangero
Not only that, the email provides me no incentive to resubscribe. It's just like, "Hey! wanna get emails from us again?!!" If they gave me some good reason I might have been interested, but the way it's written it's almost insulting to my intelligence.
Spoom
Theoretically they could just spam every active email address they know about with that message and it would still be true.

Obviously bad policy, but are you really going to attempt to sue Microsoft?