I received an email from ebay today encouraging me to sell something I’d bought earlier. The email’s got information about a prucahse I made, which meant it was unlikely to be a spam, and the headers etc check out as far as I can tell (included below). This kind of thing annoys me, and ebay’s known for changing their privacy terms in order to better send you email (opt out? we’ve changed the categories and opted you into them all). I hunted through the email…
eBay sent this e-mail to you because your Notification Preferences indicate that you want to receive information about Special Events and Promotions. eBay will not request personal data (password, credit card/bank numbers) in an e-mail. You are subscribed as derekecom@speakeasy.net, registered on eBay.
If you do not wish to receive further communications, sign into “My eBay” by clicking on the “My eBay” link found at the top of the eBay home page and change your Notification Preferences. Please note that it may take up to 10 days to process your request.
Craaaaaaaaap, so that’s it. I head off to ebay…
Nope. Moreover, I haven’t done anything to my user preferences in ages, and certainly haven’t done unsubscribed from email promotions in the last ten days.
eBay’s not just opting me into emails and forcing choice on me: they’re now actively ignoring my preferences so they can send me mail. Is this a violation of CAN-SPAM, in that eBay’s not providing a working unsubscribe mechanism? Or does their business relationship with me get them out of that? If nothing else, it’s a real annoyance.
I haven’t heard from customer support yet. I’ll be shocked if I do. For one, there’s was no suitable category to submit this under, and the chances of getting a reasonable response are pretty slim even if there was.
Headers:
From – Sat May 27 12:17:00 2006
X-Account-Key: account6
X-UIDL: 1148747042.M33295P29578V000000000000000CI0212EC50_0.mail12.sea5,S=14211
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Received: (qmail 31344 invoked from network); 27 May 2006 16:23:58 -0000
Received: from smfcamppool03.emailebay.com (HELO smfitemap02.smf.ebay.com) ([66.135.215.232])
(envelope-sender
by mail12.sea5.speakeasy.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP
for <(me)>; 27 May 2006 16:23:58 -0000
DomainKey-Signature: s=main; d=reply3.ebay.com; c=nofws; q=dns; b=B0D7J/UkvTwjJn8J8ZC9vHyz2E4Ofmc3B1oe5GGrmqECcCPKHqZ4L8pk2OvS6KhAloOO+rdHSqLM0pCxRzxkgz+D55dFz5FEXk/rnk8A6mrqZ/qgUuls8k5uOVlbZ2bp;
Received: from dooby8.smf.ebay.com (HELO [10.108.161.65]) ([10.108.161.65])
by smfitemap02.smf.ebay.com with ESMTP; 27 May 2006 09:23:57 -0700
From: “eBay”
Reply-to: eBay-US.29843852.63877.0@reply3.ebay.com
To: (me)
Subject: Sell these items you bought on eBay–and get something new!
Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 09:23:57 -0700
Message-ID: <1148747037608.eBay-US.29843852.63877.0@reply3.ebay.com>
X-Mailer: Kana Connect 6
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”1148747037608.MimeBoundarY”
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.4 (2005-06-05) on mail12.sea5
X-Spam-Level: *
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.7 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_99,EXTRA_CASH,HOT_NASTY,
HTML_80_90,HTML_FONT_BIG,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_08,HTML_MESSAGE,
HTML_TAG_EXIST_TBODY,RCVD_IN_BSP_TRUSTED autolearn=disabled
version=3.0.4