Flawed Business Model

[SpamCop 98]

I just sent this to the publicly listed email addy for the company's alleged CEO.

He should have time to read it, he hasn't updated his blog since December 2007.

Subject: Re: CityBizList - We Value Your Response

Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2010

To: edwin[at]

I never subscribed to your newsletter, you started sending it to a ROLE ACCOUNT sometime last April. This ROLE ACCOUNT never subscribes to anything, ever.

That means the email address you have been sending your "newsletter" to was SCRAPED off the Internet. It is a violation of federal law in the United States to scrape email addresses off the Internet and indiscriminately begin sending them unsolicited commercial email.

I have been reporting each and every newsletter received here to postmaster[at]blueskyfactory.com (which started bouncing, even though it is their registered abuse address). I have also sent each and every report to abuse[at]edgewebhosting.net, who has clearly done nothing.

So you can imagine my intrigue when you sent me this email:

"We Value Your Response."

Any good questionnaire is going to allow me to enter my own text in a text field, yes? WRONG! It asked only four things, all important to you but not important to any "customer" I know of: What Industry do I work in, which best describes my job title, what is my organization's employee size, and what is my email address.

Who writes your surveys, a five-year-old? That is the WORST marketing questionnaire I have ever seen. YOU ALREADY HAVE MY ADDRESS and you sent a tokenized link; clearly your database needs a little "cleaning up."

You don't "value" my response, what questions did you ask me about what I get out of CityBizList? NONE! You're only trying to gather more information about readers; you will have to do better than that.

By the way, all of our employees are of average height and weight.

You have a horrible business model if it is based on spamming people, because that is what you are doing.

Now you might ask, "Why don't I just unsubscribe?" I say, "Why do I have to jump through hoops because YOU started spamming ME?" I will never unsubscribe from something I never signed up for.

I will continue to report CityBizList because they are spamming me. Because of its flawed business practices, CityBizList really deserves to be blacklisted.