About a week ago, a friend of mine asked me to fill out an online survey for her. She’s participating in some affiliate program where she can get a free iPod or whatever if she gets x number of people to sign up under her. I didn’t have to use a credit card or anything, so I figured I’d go ahead and help her out.
The survey itself was pretty quick and painless. I think it took me five minutes to complete the thing — no biggie. At the very end, there were about two full pages of “special offers” where I had to click Yes or No radio buttons to indicate whether I wanted to get more information about college degrees, loans, coupons, and things like that. I clicked No for every single one of them.
Well, I’m not sure why I even bothered, because those damn companies have been spamming me like crazy anyway. Thank god I used a throwaway email address to register for that stupid survey, otherwise I’d be drowning in these crappy offers. I checked that email account yesterday on a whim and saw 187 spam messages from all those places I said I didn’t want any info from.
I would have nothing against email marketing if the companies respected customers’ wishes about receiving info. But the way they operate… no wonder all of these “industries” have such a bad name. 
Edit: Screenshot added from today, with 85 more spam messages already. Click thumbnail to enlarge.
July 20th, 2007 at 7:46 am
187 e-mails??? That’s crazy. I filled out one of those surveys for someone one time and got a bunch of unsolicitated e-mails as well (can you say spam???) but not 187 thank god!
July 20th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Oh, yeah… it’s that bad. I just checked the account again and there are already 85 more messages. From the timestamps, it looks like I’m getting 6-7 messages per hour. All for stuff that I said I wasn’t interested in.
I’ll add a screenshot to the post!