Money Saving Websites
October 21, 2009 at 8:23 am
You’d want to be living under a stone not to have noticed the trend for money saving websites. Here are some of my favourites:
They’re only going 10 months and are this week celebrating their 1,000th post. That’s a brilliant achievement. This is a great little site that shares recipes and reviews, and I particularly like the ‘what’s in this week at Aldi and Lidl’ reports. They always have a competition going on and as a result there’s a vibrant community of followers.
Practical ways to save money in the areas of Personal Finance, Family Spending, Lifestyle, Health & Beauty and Technology. Well known Irish journalists do much of the writing, so the feel is rather like one of the weekend magazine supplements – but all about saving cash.
An initiative from Dublin City Council, Dublin Waste is a space where people can advertise items they no longer want and you can get them for free! I remember spotting, a couple of years ago when it first launched, a BMW for swap for something interesting… there are no Beamers on there now but there are plenty of TV’s, items of furniture, baby goods, sporting goods and other random items. To avail of something good on this site, you’ve got to be quick. Arrange transport and soon that item will be yours – for free.
Jumbletown is similar. My only complaint with it (apart from the hideous navigation up top) is the difficulty in removing your item once it’s gone.
Tags: money saving websites
E-Tenders Fail
July 14, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Some time last year I signed up for the e-tenders email. I thought I might have a hope in hell of winning business from the public sector. I applied for a few, didn’t get them, but when I saw who got them, I decided it’s not worth my while – I don’t have a track record of delivering public sector projects, so no matter how good my work is (and how superior it is to some of the project winners), I can forget about it.
It is not possible to simply click and remove yourself from the e-tenders email.
What? A Government approved vehicle is breaking the law?
Shocking but true.
The email ends with an old school double line – no mention of unsubscribe button here:
A quick shimmy on over to the e-tenders website, and it’s a little opaque. You’d expect you could stop your email newsletter by clicking on Notice Alerts Service. That is the logical place where you would manage your subscriptions to alerts. But no. You have to click on your personal details, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and that’s where you can stop things being sent to you.
At first I didn’t get this, so I hit contact us, asked them to remove me, and got the ‘we will respond to this in one working day.” That gives them til Wed at 6pm. Let’s see if they live up to that promise.
In the meantime, here’s to another government website that doesn’t adhere to its own rules. Should we let our friends at the Data Protection Commissioners know? 
Tags: e-tenders fail, irish government websites, public sector tendering process
Update on KLM Spam Email
April 28, 2009 at 9:17 am
I contacted the Data Protection Commissioners to find out more about the status of my spam email complaint about KLM. They wrote to KLM on 3 April and again on 20 April. They have also written to the Privacy Office of KLM which is based in Holland.
[All these letters - it's very exciting... in a postal kind of way]
To date KLM has been ignoring them. But now they’ve been onto the Dutch equivalent of the Data Protection Commissioners – and there’s an all Europe-wide APB out for them… No, actually they have provided more contact details for our guys to follow up on.
We’ll wait and see if big corporate KLM chooses to engage or ignore.
Tags: Data Protection Commissioners, KLM Spam Email
Data Commissioners Are A Waste Of Time
October 18, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Remember my problem with the Golden Spiders and being spammed a little while ago? I took the time out to report it to the Data Commissioners in the hope that they would actually do something. This is what I heard back:
On 10 October, I received an email back from Edel Carty the investigating officer (I’m seeing visions of CSI with an Irish flavour here!). Guess what the Data Commissioners did? They contacted the Golden Spiders people and you know what? The Golden Spiders people fobbed them off with this : “What happened was we had multiple subscriber
groups and we sent the newsletter to all of these groups. When someone nsubscribed they only unsubscribed from one group and therefore still eceived the newsletter. So once she contacted us we removed her from one ubscriber group but she was still getting email through another subscriber roup. We have gone though all our data bases now and made sure she and a small number of other duplications have been removed.”
They should have done that when I first unsubscribed.
Furthermore. “Our sincerest apologies on this, we weren’t aware of the situation until now.”
That’s a lie as I telephoned them to get off their list. And I told their damned telesales girls too.
And to add insult to injury, they wish to contact me directly – to apologise.
NO WAY.
I have been waiting a week now to hear from Edel Carty because I emailed her back on 10 October to tell her that this reply was not acceptable. I do not accept their crap excuses and I’d like to know specifically how many times an offender has to spam and to how many people in order to get more than just a caution from the Data Commissioners.
She hasn’t replied to date. So for anyone involved in marketing, the message is clear: spam all you like, the legless powerless data commissioners office is only there to create a few more public sector jobs and to do nothing.
It’s still going on – NTL is busy spamming people today. And what can we do about it? Don’t bother reporting it because you’re just wasting your time.
This kind of thing makes me mad.
Sick of being spammed by the Golden Spiders?
October 4, 2007 at 11:03 am
It’s ridiculous – I’ve received about 8 emails since unsubscribing, an annoying phone call asking me why I haven’t nominated anyone this year, and it’s annoying. It’s distracting me from my work, wasting my time, and is in blatant disregard of the law on spamming.
UPDATE ON FRIDAY 5 OCT: I have just got another phone call from Jenny at the Golden Spiders. These people are driving me demented.
We have a data commissioners who are responsible for following up complaints on spamming. So if you actually want to do something about this, simply click this link and fill in the form.The address you need to fill in for the Golden Spiders on the form is: c/o Business & Finance, 1-4 Swift’s Alley,Francis Street, Dublin 8.
Update 1: Brian Greene forwarded on an email which he received from Don Farrell at Circulator. It was obviously in response to Brian’s own request to get off the lists. Circulator’s response it to absolve themselves of all reponsiblity – “The issue here is that you are in two subscriber groups and our client sent the newsletter to both groups. As Circulator is a self service application, we don’t get involved with each clients subscription list / distribution.”
That is not acceptable. I manage email campaigns on behalf of clients and it is my job to ensure that the unsubscribe process works. And if someone unsubscribes, no matter how many lists, that their name is removed. This spamming by the Golden Spiders is taking place on such a large scale that it is clearly not just 1 or 2 names that are appearing on multiple lists – it looks to me like there is flagrant ignoring of people’s requests to get off their lists.
Entry levels must be pretty low if they are so desperately calling people to enter.
Update 2: I have just fired off a volley of emails to Edel Carty at the Data Commissioners Office. I received an email from Edel, the Senior Investigating Officer, requesting copies of the emails received from Golden Spiders. Happily I fired all of them over to her. Let’s see what happens now….
Rant About CDWOW
March 23, 2007 at 9:58 am
Once upon a time, before iTunes was invented, I purchased a cd from cdwow. Ever since then they have bombarded me with regular emails. I know I posted about this before, but I’m bringing it up again because now it the time to take action.
My main reason for complaint prior to this was that when you click the link on the email to unsubscribe, it takes you to the cdwow site and you have to know your user name and password in order to log in and unsubscribe. This is not email marketing best practice – you are supposed to make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe.
I don’t know my user name and password and I used to be afraid to retrieve them in case it opens me up to even more of a barrage of emails. This morning however, I decided to succumb, retrieve them and unsubscribe from cdwow hell forever.
Can you imagine my apoplexy when I logged in and found that I was ticked yes to receive cdwow updates and yes to receive offers from partners? I never ever agree to this. Why would anyone in their right mind agree to be spammed? Because that’s essentially what it is – receiving emails from companies that you don’t know. Cdwow are lying!
Sensible readers will be making sounds round about now that I should simply report this callous breach of my wishes to the Data Protection Commissioner. Well I did and the response isn’t that hopeful. Their view is that they can only do something if the email is sent to Irish recipients from an Irish server. So even though cdwow is a dot ie, if they send the emails using a web-based email messaging service based in the US for example, then the Data Protection Commissioners have no jurisdiction. So cdwow can continue to send their tacky emails in flagrant breach of the European Directive on email communications.
What can you do? Send an email to the Data Protection Commissioners requesting them to review their stance on jurisdiction. Ask them to alter their position to investigate dot ie’s no matter what server is being used.
In the meantime, I have forwarded the offending email to a helpful person at the commissioners and have requested that she contact cdwow and request a list of their partners to whom my details might have been leaked out. Let’s see how complicit cdwow are.
And finally, for all your music needs I recommend iTunes.
