An Inbox Full O’ Receipts

Dave parodying those pesky “Dear business owner” emails one tends to get:

I clearly have no ethics, but you should enter a business relationship with me, a guy who found your email on the internet.

That’s the subtext of those emails.

You are now signed up for a no-opt-out email drip campaign to send you automated replies every day for the next week to get you to reply.

Dave’s post is in the context of drive-by email spamming.

But what triggered me was the similar subtext communicated when you purchase products (that you sought out) from legitimate businesses.

You know that feeling when you just need to buy one thing online, your email is required as part of the transaction, and now you are subscribed to an email campaign until the end of time (unless you then explicitly opt-out)?

Yeah, that “standard” practice. This is the subtext:

“Hello. You just purchased some of our ___. Thank you for signaling your interest in our product. You had to enter your email to complete that transaction, and now we have opted you in to a campaign that will send you automated emails of our latest offerings and information about our business. You had no choice in this. You will now receive these emails forever unless you find the little tiny unsubscribe link in these emails and click it. Once clicked, you will be taken to a page where you have to click a button to actually unsubscribe (this is because some email clients automatically follow links in our emails, like the “Unsubscribe” one, so we have to ensure you actually want to unsubscribe to these emails which you never subscribed to in the first place). Thank you for doing business with us. We hope this will hook into giving us more money in the future.”

It reminds me of those really long receipts you get from places like CVS. You buy one thing, you get a receipt that’s two feet long.

That’s how I feel buying things online. You buy one thing and the default is you now get an infinitely-long receipt.