Amour Chaleur

With the rise in the numbers of online blogshops in Singapore, the number of spams in my mailbox has also increased significantly the past few months. For the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with the terms, a blogshop is actually an online shop which sells mostly imported clothes, bags and accessories and most of these blogshops use Blogger or LiveJournal to update their products catalogue.

Blogshops usually have the mailing list system whereby emails are sent to the people who subscribed when there’s a special promotion or product updates. I have totally no objections towards shops that have mailing lists to update those who are interested. Please note the key word: interested. I am not interested if I did not subscribe to the mailing list. Forcing me to read the mailing list is not going to help the business and spamming is just the first step to kill the customer base. Spamming your potential customers is definitely not a wise act. Even if I had been interested in the products you are selling, I would never spend a single cent in a blogshop which uses spamming as a marketing strategy.

Furthermore, it’s really frustrating to know what a hypocrite some of them are. Most of them have a message saying that if you would wish to subscribe from the mailing list, they will respect your decision or a message of similar context. Majority of the time, I noticed my emails notifying them of the fact that I did not subscribe in the first place and would wish to be remove from the list went unread. I do not feel as though my privacy has been respected just because they claim to do so in the email. Marking them as spams in Gmail isn’t a long term solution since they will still land up in my inbox somehow. My solution is to create a filter which moves all the emails with the name of the blogshop into the spam folder directly without giving it a chance to sit in my inbox. I check my spam folder for false positives occasionally so I’m not worrying if genuine emails landed there.

I seriously think blogshop’s owners should also look into how mailing lists work before jumping straight into it. Some blogshops obtain additional email addresses from spree pages or other mailing lists to send their updates to. Blind carbon copy (Bcc:) exist for a reason such as sending mailing lists so why aren’t they using it? I have receive spam mailing lists which have all the email addresses in the “To:” field. They have just “contributed” my email address to the spam list. No thanks for that! Kudos to them for taking the first step in ruining their own business!