Re: SPAM?!?!?! [TANKS]

[Brian Kraack <bkraack-at-siscom.net>]

I guess Karen chose the wrong day to spam me, as I am feeling 
particularly unhappy about receiving it. I sent her this reply, which I 
post here, just in case she is reading the forum, and for your 
entertainment:

----

Dear Karen,

Your email to me (contained below)[snipped from this forum post] is 
undesired, unsolicited SPAM!

I know it's spam because you told me you found my email in a forum. And 
many other forum members have posted on that forum the exact same spam 
you sent to me. Also, it's spam because you are sending a marketing form 
letter to a person you have never met (or even corresponded with), in 
the (now vain) hope that I might buy something from you.

You must not know that spam is considered BAD. Nobody wants to get it. 
Smart people who get it not only don't buy whatever you are selling, but 
they ACTIVELY DON'T BUY it. Meaning you get no sales from that person 
and worse, a bad reputation that the person might take joy in spreading 
to all his friends.

Since spam has been around and been hated for a very long while, by a 
great many people, you either are clueless about what spam is and why 
you should not do it, or you simply don't care if you send out spam mail 
to your unsuspecting victims. Neither attribute serves to entice me to 
become a customer or in any way do any future business with you or your 
company.

To add injury to insult, you attached a 2.26 MB pdf file to your spam, 
wasting my time and bandwidth with your unsolicited trash. I don't want 
people I know sending me files that large, let alone some sales drone I 
have never met. Did you consider that some of the people you spammed are 
not connected to the internet via a broadband connection? and that 2.26 
MB files take a significant amount of time to download over a dial-up 
connection? Clearly, you did not.

You should know better. But since you don't, I've included here the 
address of a website that should provide you with a lot of good 
information about what spam is and why you should not do it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam

As one of the forum members suggested, you would have been better served 
to simply provide some sample units to the most active forum members and 
hope that they would say nice things about your product on the forum for 
you.

I want to inform you that your spam did not work. I did go to look at 
your website, but that was only to see what it was that I WOULD NEVER be 
purchasing. Not only is your product not particularly relevant to our 
hobby (in the way that just any toy car isn't relevant to a NASCAR fan), 
I won't buy it because you spammed me, and our mailing list.

I don't speak for anyone else on the mailing list, but I suspect at 
least some of them share my opinions.

Finally, please remove my email address from your mailing list and do 
NOT email me any future spam or other forms of solicited or unsolicited 
mail. I also request, unofficially on behalf of the forum whose members 
you just spammed, that you refrain from ever doing so again.

Regards,
Brian

Kevin wrote:

> I actually kinda like what we have here. It is a different environment 
> then a message board. All the discussions come into my inbox in a 
> line. It’s kinda like if I had a record of the conversations that went 
> on between all of us if we sat around in my living room. Different 
> topics going on but I only go one place to get all of them. I’m not 
> voting against going to a message forum instead of a mailing list, but 
> if the question is raised then you know how I feel about it. 
> Ultimately I don’t think it is something we can vote on. I think it is 
> up to whichever person is actually the one running this board to add a 
> forum to their web server. I guess we could go and setup a forum 
> independent of them but we’d only be taking away from the site that I 
> think is the center of 6^th scale tank combat. I’ll go where the boss 
> says to go.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:* tanks-admin-at-rctankcombat.com 
> [mailto:tanks-admin-at-rctankcombat.com] *On Behalf Of *Carioti, John
> *Sent:* Thursday, August 03, 2006 9:45 AM
> *To:* tanks-at-rctankcombat.com
> *Subject:* RE: SPAM?!?!?! [TANKS]
>
> Has anyone considered using the Delphi Forums for the RC Tank Combat 
> discussions? Using Delphi would eliminate this Spam sort of thing from 
> happening because no emails are shown at any time during the posts.
>
> While it isn't perfect, it has a very slick interface that allows 
> topics to be customized and grouped (e.g. mechanical, electrical, 
> events, treads, etc) That way if you are interested in a particular 
> topic, it is very easy to look for information that pertains to that 
> specific area. And you can post pictures directly to the group.
>
> The Robot Combat guys have 5 or 6 groups on there, and there is a lot 
> of great information that is easy to get at. Or- it is very easy to 
> ignore areas that you have no interest in.
>
> The forum is free and it is easy to set up. Each forum can choose 
> several moderators who can delete off topic posts, move posts to the 
> correct area, etc. There is also a search function that works pretty 
> good- but it only allows searching back 3 months (or something like 
> that). Maybe you could keep the archives on the rctankcombat site and 
> migrate the new stuff to Delphi.
>
> I'm new here, so maybe this has been discussed before- sorry if it's 
> something you've already talked about!
>
> John
>
> www.chippermonkey.com <http://www.chippermonkey.com>
>
>     -----Original Message-----
>     *From:* tanks-admin-at-rctankcombat.com
>     [mailto:tanks-admin-at-rctankcombat.com] *On Behalf Of *kevin harden
>     *Sent:* Thursday, August 03, 2006 10:11 AM
>     *To:* tanks-at-rctankcombat.com
>     *Subject:* Re: SPAM?!?!?! [TANKS]
>
>     yep looks like we all got one, it even popped up in another site
>     I'm with as well, so like you all said ignore and maybe she will
>     go away, kev uk
>
>