In a perfect world, the jerks would recognize their jerky quality and own up to it and apologize, but I’ll waste a lot of time if I count on that to happen with people who spam me. The sting of the violent responses I received over the years is still with me, and that strengthened my resolve to take the high road and not perpetuate the nastiness. I see value in leading by example, for myself, even if the spammer doesn’t follow suit.

I’m in a zenlike state these days. When you’re at the other end of the country, helping a frail, incontinent loved one with pull up diapers, things like spam seem very inconsequential in the overall scheme of things. If there ever were a time for me to let things go and focus on priorities — like my mother, right now — this is it.

Keep up the good work!

Good perspective; we can all learn a lot from sitting in the other person’s shoes.

I once emailed someone with whom I had a previous business relationship – a person of moderate stature in their industry. As opposed to asking me politely to take her name off of my list, she decided that a “please stop spamming me” blog post was in order.

Scott gave this guy the benefit of the doubt — and then some — BUT there’s a lot to learn on both sides of the coin.

I am personally now getting 2-3 bulk mailings from PR people every week. And I am not a journalist, I just write a blog.

Someone has gone out and created a mailing list for PR people — perhaps selling it to them — and the result is a ton of new unwanted mail from clueless PR people.

The point that you should make on your blog is DON’T SEND BULK MAIL, especially not to purchased mailing lists. This is spam, and is covered by the CAN SPAM act.

Kudos to Scott for calling that troll on his behavior. I hope others who use emails for commercial purposes wise up and begin to follow proper opt-out procedures, and for pete’s sake, don’t toot your horn when you’re being so stupid.

In Scott’s case the spammer seems to have a remarkably faulty understanding of what is legally considered spam for a PR professional. Even you defined those emails as spam. I would think it’s kind of hard to excuse that kind of mistake by a PR as “innocent”. Ignorant (and arrogant) would be more accurate.

In your situations you were incorrectly and unfairly called a spammer because 1) a simple typo and 2) someone’s faulty assumptions about you. Very different situations.

Scott did respond politely to be removed from the list. He continued to get them for months. On his fourth request to remove him from the list, he asked to stop being spammed.

Did Scott get his dander up? Yea probably so. Was it excessive? I don’t think so. We allow too many people to simply ignore the rules of common sense. If someone asks to be taken off your list… remove them. Include an unsubscribe link in your email.

Do you really want your information going to someone who really doesn’t want to get it? PR is public relations. I think we focus too much on the Public part and not enough on the relations part.

We are building relations with potential clients, customers of our customers. I would encourage everyone to think about their process of communication. Does it build on the relationship or does it potentially create a damaging incident?

With the advancement of social networks, people are more inter connected than every before. Issues like this can now be seen by many more people than before.

Do I always agree with Scott? No. Though he does have a cool first name. But in this case I think he was pretty dead on.

I’ve been called a bitch more than once for asking someone to stop spamming me. Call me what you like, but when you spam me, I’m going to call it what it is.

If you are the sender of the unwanted email, admit you erred, apologize and stop “right-fighting”.

I also have to say that I see where Scott is coming from. This PR guy ticked me off, not because of the spam mail and the ignoring of the repeated requests, but because of the really unethical and unprofessional way he handled himself and his client. That type of tossing around names and “mine’s bigger” mentality gives the PR professionals a bad name. So I say Kudos to Scott for standing up to this guy – even though it made no difference whatsoever in how the jerk will do business in the future.