Kafka-esque tire credit card

I get a lot of emails that aren’t for me. Dozens every day. I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill spam but rather emails where someone has either deliberately or accidentally entered my email address instead of their own when signing up for a product or service.

Predictably, most of these are X-rated dating sites where the person in question doesn’t want to use their real identity. In the same category are car sales signups (the people selling these cars don’t give up easily, I can tell you).

More baffling are those when it’s a personal financial thing. These people seem to genuinely think my email is their email.

The great majority of these sites allow me to unsubscribe, but a few just won’t.  These tend to be the ones with the greatest volume of follow-up emails.  The logic of these applications is obviously flawed: any unverified email address can be used to sign up; yet in order to unsign-up this email, you have to prove you are the person who erroneously entered your email address (which you obviously can’t do!).

In a few cases I’ve had to log in to the person’s account on the porno site and change the email address. But until today, even the worst offenders have at least had a contact email so I can manually ask someone to sort it out.

The email below from Good Year credit cards offers me nothing!

The links all ask me to log in. I can’t reset the password without the full credit card number and the last four digits of the person’s social security number. All contact has to take place by phone. I bravely called the international number. I was told ‘Call back during normal office hours’. They didn’t say what these were.  Agonisingly, there’s one link in the email that does take me to an options page where I don’t have to log in. But the only option is to remove certain information from the emails.

Inevitably I just have to mark these emails as spam.

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Hey companies – how about you do a simple confirm opt-in before taking someone’s email address as gospel!

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