Steve Fenton

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Tuesday, 7th February 2012

The problem with email is that there is a lot of spam out there. You give your email address to a company and miss a tick box (or fall for one of many nasty tricks to con you into giving your permission to be spammed) and the next thing you know your inbox is destroyed by people trying to sell you stuff - or even worse, trying to fool you into ruining your life.

The result, for me at least, is that I'm not willing to give companies online my real email address. It is preferable by far to give an email address that you don't really use, so your normal inbox isn't wrecked. If you are still giving out your main email address to companies online, stop right now.

I ran a test, by supplying unique email addresses to a number of companies. On the whole, the big companies played fair. For example, Amazon only ever send me information about actual orders I have placed, or pre-orders where the release date or price changes.

Dixons retail PLC annoyed me a bit when they started to share my email address between their brands. I started getting emails sent to my PC World email address from Currys, a shop I never intend to purchase from again. All this did was remind me that the money all ends up in the same place, so I stopped buying from them too.

I am also disappointed with Tesco. They have increased the frequency of their marketing messages, so I decided to unsubscribe. When I clicked on the link they supply in their email, I found myself on the following web page:

So while appearing to be a good company by offering an unsubscribe link, it doesn't work. I received two emails from Tesco to two different unique email addresses and neither unsubscribe link worked.

The bottom line is that consumers don't trust mailing lists because of the range of tactics employed by companies on-line - some of whom you would expect to operate in a much more honest manner. If people could be confident that you won't share their email address, you won't email them too often and that they can easily unsubscribe at any time (without having to log-in to change their preferences) then they would be more willing to sign up. Until companies commit to these points, don't give them your email address.