It is worth noting that E. Peter Mullane’s chief claim to fame is that he is one of the lawyers who defended John J. Connolly Jr., the former FBI agent who was convicted in federal court of racketeering, obstruction of justice, murder and conspiracy to commit murder and will be spending the rest of his life in prison. Nice!
I am not going to publish Mullane’s letter here, because there are all kinds of legal issues with that, and… well… Mullane is a lawyer, y’know? I will, however, publish the response I just sent him, from which you can get a pretty good idea of the claims he made in his letter. Enjoy!
I am not going to waste my time explaining why this is clearly intended to deceive the recipient about the source, importance, and content of these mailings. I know this is so; you know this is so; the methods of deception and intent to deceive are obvious. I’m quite certain that a judge will agree.
I received a number of these mailings before I finally decided to ask you to stop sending them. On October 15, I sent a message through the contact form on your Web site which read as follows:
(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)
(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)
For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.
This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.
Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.
Honda Village did not have the courtesy to reply. Furthermore, since I sent the message quoted above, I have received at least two more of these offensive mailings, the most recent one today.
If you had stopped sending these when I asked you to stop, I would have left it at that. But since you didn’t, I have decided to teach you a lesson not only about not sending junk mail to people who have asked you to stop, but also about engaging in deceptive trade practices.
I first asked Frank Shaw at Vanguard Realty in Brighton, MA to stop sending me junk mail in January 2008, through a contact form on his Web site. He ignored me.
More junk mail arrived in late March, so I asked him again, this time using both the form and a phone call.
He sent me back a snarky response. I, in term, sent him an equally snarky response. He responded a second time, and this time he was somewhat less snarky and more conciliatory.
Conciliatory though he may have been, he didn’t actually do what I asked. Since then, I have received at least five pieces of junk mail from him, and one from another Realtor in his office.
It seems that refrigerator magnets are Frank’s gimmick, since several of the junk mailings have contained them — the Patriots schedule, the Red Sox schedule, a 2010 calendar, etc. I have no use for any of these, and they are far worse for the environment than simple paper junk mail.
Vanguard Realty is right in my neighborhood. When my wife and I decide to sell our house, using a Realtor near us would be quite convenient both to us and to potential buyers. But we’re not going to use one who ignores the most basic of requests (“stop sending us junk mail!”) from potential customers, and in the process damages the environment.
One cannot help but wonder why Frank doesn’t seem to understand that alienating potential customers is bad for business.
I just sent the following email message to Mark G. Ackermann, the President and CEO of Lighthouse International:
Dear Mr. Ackermann,
I am taking the unusual step of writing to you because my efforts to get this issue resolved “through channels” for over two years have failed.
In a nutshell, I have asked Lighthouse International to remove me from your postal mailing list six times since October 2007. Since my first request, you have sent me eight mailings, the most recent received yesterday, November 25.
Jack Swartz, President The Vilna Shul
18 Phillips Street
Boston, MA 02114
Dear Mr. Swartz,
I am writing to you because my efforts over the past two years to resolve this matter through The Vilna Shul’s executive director, Steven Greenberg, have been unsuccessful.
Over two years ago, I embarked upon an ambitious effort to eliminate the junk mail – paper mail delivered by the postal service, not junk email – that our family receives. These mailings are bad for the environment because of the resources consumed by producing and transporting them. Furthermore, they are a waste of money for the organizations and companies that send them, because we don’t actually read them.
Eliminating all the junk mail was an ambitious undertaking, because my wife and I support many non-profit organizations, and they all felt the need to write to us at least once per year, and in many cases much more often than that. Furthermore, the non-profits we support sometimes rent and sell their mailing lists to others to whom we have not donated in the past.
Therefore, for over two years, I have contacted every company and organization that has sent us junk mail and asked each of them to remove us from its mailing list. This has been a very time-consuming process, but it has also been very successful. The vast majority of institutions I have contacted have been more than willing to remove us from their lists and have had no trouble doing so. Unfortunately, there have been a few marked exceptions. I’m sorry to say that The Vilna Shul is one of them.
You’ve all gotten them, right? An envelope, or sometimes even a box, from some alleged charity you’ve never heard of before. You open it up and discover personalized mailing labels, greeting cards, a notepad, a tree ornament, a cheap electronic doodad, a coin, or whatever, along with a plea to send a donation.
The strategy the charity is employing is twofold: some confused old people and idiots will think they’re required to send a donation in exchange for the junk, and some others will feel compelled to send a donation because they would otherwise feel guilty about accepting something for nothing from a charity.
I call these “guilt mailings.”
(Interestingly, the UK’s Institute of Fundraising says they’re a no-no: “Fundraising organisations ought to be able to demonstrate that the purpose of the enclosure was to enhance the message and/or the emotional engagement in the cause, and not to generate a donation primarily because of financial guilt or to cause embarrassment.”)
I know what the senders of these mailings are trying to do, and I know it’s slimy, so I’m completely immune to their efforts to generate guilt. Not only that, but rather than prompting me to donate, guilt mailings tend to have the opposite effect — I tend to put any charity which uses them onto my “do not donate” list for good. If the freebie is useful, I go ahead and use it without any qualms at all. I’m heartless about it… when they send reply envelopes with stamps on them, I cut off the stamps and use them to send my own letters, just on principle.
I thought by now I’d seen it all, but I received in the mail today the guilt mailing to beat all guilt mailings, from St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota: (more…)
Since I first wrote about them in June, Honda Village has sent me many more pieces of junk mail enclosed in envelopes that do not have their name or return address on them and that have been intentionally designed to make the recipient think they are some sort of official business so that the recipient will open them rather than throwing them away.
As I wrote then, I consider this type of direct marketing to be exceedingly slimy. I finally got annoyed enough about it today that I’ve sent Honda Village this message through their Web site. We’ll see if they actually listen.
(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)
(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)
For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.
This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.
Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.
My blog postings about the DMA (initial and followup) got picked up at The Consumerist and got over 5,200 views, which is a respectable take, but not nearly as good as when Continental lost my daughter . You will also find on The Consumerist a rebuttal from the DMA which doesn’t actually respond substantively to any of my complaints.
My detailed analysis of everything that’s wrong with the DMA’s Web site from a security point of view was published in the RISKS Digest.
After my complaints were published on my blog and at The Consumerist, I continued to have additional problems with the Web site. I contacted the DMA through the form on the site and asked for assistance, and they did not respond. Apparently, they’ve decided that they don’t actually have to support users whom they don’t like.
Earlier today, I wrote about the many ways in which the DMA’s MPS Web site is broken and about the fact that the people who run the site don’t really seem to care all that much.
I forwarded a link to my article to the DMA’s consumer affairs email address. To their credit, they responded the same day. Unfortunately, there response did nothing to reassure me that they have a clue about how to run a proper Web site; exactly the opposite, in fact. Here’s why: (more…)
Since 1971, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has offered a service called the Mail Preference Service (MPS). The alleged purpose of the MPS is to allow consumers to register which kinds of direct marketing mail they want, or to opt out completely. DMA members are then supposed to scrub their mailing lists against the MPS lists and not send mailings to people who don’t want them.
Why would an association whose members make their money from direct mailings offer a service to allow people to opt out? While they cloak their motives in all kinds of fancy language about consumer choice, protecting the environment by reducing unwanted mailings, etc., the real reason why is to offer voluntary self-regulation to dissuade the states and federal government from regulating the industry. And it works — the mail direct marketing industry is essentially unregulated.
However, as noted, the DMA’s members don’t actually want consumers to opt out of their mailings, so they’ve always made it difficult and annoying to sign up for the MPS. For example:
Enrolment expires after three years.
There is no notification from the DMA when your enrolment is going to expire.
Obviously, the DMA and its members are intimately familiar with utilizing the U.S. Postal Service’s change-of-address lists to update their mailing lists when people move. They could easily use the same lists to update the MPS, thus obviating the need for entries on the list to expire at all, but they don’t do this.
Long after everybody under the sun was doing things like this on-line, the DMA continued to require people to send in forms by U.S. Mail to enroll in the MPS.
When they did finally start letting people enroll on-line, they charged a fee, and the enrolment Web site was awful. (I’m not certain, but I think there was a time during which they were even charging a fee for enrolments sent in via the U.S. Mail.)
They’ve finally started letting people enroll on-line for free, but the (new) Web site is just as awful and doesn’t work, and they don’t care, which is what has prompted me to write this blog entry.
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. You will also find on The Consumerist a rebuttal from the DMA which doesn’t actually respond substantively to any of my complaints.