Going through my spam folder again today, I noticed an email from Rogers, my wireless provider. It was a promotional message (as opposed to the one I get every month telling me my bill is ready) announcing, and I kid you not folks, that they redesigned their website.

(Email sent Nov. 13, 2007. Click to embiggen)

Since I’m not a fan of spam, especially from large companies that should know better like Chapters/Indigo and CIBC (the latter — a bank — has still not responded to my request for an explanation beyond assigning it a support ticket number), I couldn’t let this one go without mentioning it as well.

The big difference here is that I am a Rogers customer, so they didn’t harvest my email or take it from an old form gathering dust in their basement. But I call it spam because I never asked for it and it’s purely promotional in nature.

Also problematic:

• The email is not personalized, even with my name, violating one of Rogers’s own anti-fraud policies. Further complicating matters is that I’m invited to click on image links that bring me to addresses that start with http://mailtrack.rnm.ca… (which redirects me to a Rogers website).
• The message is HTML only, with no plain-text version
• Clicking on links to visit the “new” Rogers.com brings me to this horribly-designed web page which asks me to choose my province (and language). Don’t they already know this information? They provide me wireless service after all.
• Like a lot of these messages I see, there’s a tiny link at the bottom for people who want to “opt-out of future email communications” (which I can assume implies I never opted-in in the first place). That link brings me to a login page. Once I login, I’m brought to the standard homepage with no clue given on where I should go to opt out of emails. I’ve looked around for about 10 minutes now and still haven’t found it.
• I’ve had to login three times browsing the site. And now they’ve just suspended my account for 24 hours because the password I used 5 minutes ago is no longer the right one. Oh wait, it hasn’t. My previous login is now still valid. Top-notch security there, Rogers.
• There’s no difference between the “new” Rogers website and the old one, except for a few trivial changes. It looks exactly the same. The entire purpose of the email is put into question.

I’ve filled out an “abuse” form and emailed the sender of the email message asking for an explanation of how I got this email. I’ll update if I get one.