This is a kind of “sister” post to something James Cridland wrote earlier this week on his blog. He was talking about the email that my employer is currently sending out to people who are still using our old virginradio.co.uk domain.
But of course he’s only seeing half the story. At work, our IT department has set up the mail system to email us everytime we get an email (and shh, don’t tell anyone, but we do actually get copies of the emails even though the bounced mail tells us we don’t – it just persuades individuals to update their contacts and start using the correct email address).
In fact, I find those additional emails a little annoying, so don’t tell our IT department but I wrote a couple of rules. One to move them out of my Inbox, and another to instead flag emails being sent to the old domain.
But this takes me to the crux of this blog entry. The bulk of the emails that are still being sent to the old domain are automated mailing lists and newsletters. Those bounce-back emails are disappearing into a black hole, and it’s up to me to update the lists that I want to carry on receiving mail from.
This should be easy, but of course, it’s ridiculously hard. Some email doesn’t have any update or unsubscribe options at all. More commonly, there’s just an unsubscribe option. That means that I probably have to re-register, which is, of course, time consuming, and also makes it very easy for me to not bother at all – something that most of these companies would rather didn’t happen.
Then there are the companies that require you to remember what password you used when you set up an “account” simply for the purpose of registering for their newsletter. If you’re lucky, they have a “forgotten your password” option. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll actually get an email back from them with either a reminder or a reset option within the same hour. Top-tip – make sure these services send out email instantly, otherwise you might lose me as a customer altogether.
Some of these emails come from trade publishers who offer a wealth of newsletters for a variety of magazines. It’s far easier if I can make one change that affects their entire portfolio rather than lots of separate changes. Ironically, many of these magazines cover marketing, yet their list management software is poor.
Google Alerts are actually more annoying than they should be. I have a number of alerts (including the obligatory vanity alert) that are sent to my Gmail account. But I also have a set of work-related searches that I have to adminster “outside” the environs of Google because there seems to be a single email address for all. Perhaps their recent RSS feed option for these searches is the way to go? My only solution is to delete all the current alerts and re-create them with my new email address, ensuring I’m logged out of Google at the time.
Changing addresses is never easy at the best of times. The Royal Mail has a forwarding service for you to use for snail mail – but that’s not always possible if you move jobs or ISPs. So given that we’re all going to want to change our details from time to time, there’s really no excuse for making it hard for the user to administer.