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SearchWin2000

This is a web site about Windows 2000

Getting Off a Mailing List 

Once upon a time, I stumbled across a web site devoted to Windows 2000 called searchWin2000 (if you enter www.searchwin2000.com into a web browser, it actually resolves to searchwin2000.techtarget.com). I subscribed to their mailing list. After a while, I decided to unsubscribe to their mailing list (this gripe has nothing to do with the content of the mailing list). 

Not so easy. 

Good mailing list software tells you the email address that a message was sent to. Really good software addresses the message to you in the TO field of the message. Other software tells you in the body of the message, as part of the unsubscribe instructions. The software that runs the mailing list for SearchWin2000 does not tell you at all. For someone who has multiple email addresses, such as myself, this is quite annoying. It can make it very hard to un-subscribe from a mailing list. 

My first un-subscribe attempt via email was ignored. My second attempt produced a return message with an error -- they could not find my email address as having subscribed to anything (it was not in their "site registered users list"). The message offered a couple suggestions and then said: 

If I figure it out? They should tell me. They have the information but are too incompetent to tell me. 

I was lucky enough to have used an email address of a forwarding service. Inspection of the headers of the mail sent to me by searchWin2000 showed this forwarding service in the middle of the chain. If not for this, I would have had to try and unsubscribe from a dozen different email addresses. 

When you do unsubscribe from a newsletter, they send you an email message confirming this. Fine. But it takes 24 hours for the unsubscribe to actually take effect. A web site specializing in computers should not need 24 hours to process a database update. 

August 2, 2001. Twenty four hours in not enough. Over two days after successfully un-subscribing to the mailing list, I still get email messages. Undaunted, I unsubscribed again and again got an email message saying that the unsubscribe request was honored. 

August 15, 2001. Despite two requests to be taken off the mailing list, I still get email from SearchWin2000 two weeks later. Both un-subscribe requests were said to have been successful. They were done by replying to an email message with the word REMOVE in the subject line. I then took a good look at the responses to the un-subscribe requests (shown below). 

Apparently they have multiple newsletters. I went to the web site to un-subscribe. You don't directly un-subscribe, you register. In my case, it meant updating my profile. Before letting me un-subscribe, they required my mailing address.