Friday, March 13, 2009

Why doesn't Oracle let me unsubscribe?

A few years ago, I did some work on an Oracle database. Due to this, I was 'known' in the mailing list of Oracle (both hardcopy mailings and e-mail).

Since already a while, I do not work on anything of Oracle. However, I still receive e-mails with newsletters or invitations. So how can I get out of the mailing list of Oracle?

At the bottom of each e-mail, there is a sentence that you can unsubscribe to these e-mails. By clicking on this, a new e-mail is generated with a prefilled e-mail address of Oracle. Too bad that the link will not pre-fill the subject. You have to make sure yourself that the correct subject is filled (UNSUBSCRIBE ).

I think I have send this 'unsubscribe-e-mail' already about 20 times. And I still am getting the same e-mails...... Even sending an e-mail to Oracle with the question why this doesn't work did not get any reaction.

Although the action to unsubscribe seems quite easy, it apparently isn't. To me, this has a double negative effect for Oracle: besides the fact that I am now very annoyed when I get yet another newsletter from Oracle, I will think twice before subscribing again to something.

This morning, I learned that a colleague of mine is having the same problem, but with a different company (ICIParisXL). She is also trying to get of their mailing list. So apparently, there are more companies that are kind of refusing to take people of their mailing-lists!

We agreed that a company like ICIParisXL should also handle an unsubscription correctly, but especially a company like Oracle should handle this in a correct matter.

Hopefully, we will succeed someday in unsubscribing!