Customer Care, marthasflowers.com (Part II)

Dear "Martha":

It continues to amaze me that I am still receiving email messages from marthastewart.com after my several, repeated attempts to unsubscribe myself from your website. I gather from your emails that by clicking the unsubscribe button, I only manage to win myself relief from one of the hundred departments of the Martha Stewart empire. But the other 99 continue to write me. Must I unsubscribe from each miserable department seriatim?

No, I need not, because you propose a solution, don't you? You instruct that to "remove myself from all emails," I need only log in to my marthastewart.com account and adjust my account settings. Naturally, when I try to do that, my login fails — this because I have no such account with marthastewart.com.

To recap, then: I don't have an account with your site, and yet I get constant, annoying emails from you. I can't stop the emails unless I create an account. The vicious circularity of this practice is stunning to me. It's vaguely extortionate, and it's not entirely clear to me that you're not violating the federal anti-spam laws with this practice. But blah blah; I've written this before.

Note to whoever gets this message: please give my regards to Kevin G ———, a colleague of yours who wrote back to me on this subject on December 13 of last year. Kevin did me the favor of contacting your marketing department to get this handled. That seems to be where we lost our momentum. Those gunners in marketing . . . what can you do with them? At any rate, when you see Kevin this morning, please give him a hug, and maybe top off his coffee for him, because at least he tried.

[Phutatorius]