Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

So I continue to get twice daily emails from Performance Bike. I know they are trying to do good, but the volume and inability to unsubscribe only angers me more. As I have noted in the past, it only takes one email communication to upset a customer enough to turn them off completely to your brand.

To further the situation, the “Report Spam” feature in Gmail doesn’t seem to care what I do. If I hit “Report Spam”, it moves that message to Spam and then the next day I get two more. I think we’re approaching a CAN-SPAM violation here.

Taken from the CAN-SPAM website:

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor’s email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it’s illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

So what is my recourse here, send in a report to the FTC? They say to email spam@uce.gov, but I can imagine how inundated with spam that email address is on a daily basis. Shame, shame on the FTC as well for not obfuscating that email address on their own page.

Anyone have any suggestions?