I-Click Digital Shop, Spamming Is Not The Way To Promote Your Business (Resolved)

November 01 01:40 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved by I-Click and they have since sent an apology. The e-mails have stopped roughly around November 1, 4pm – shortly after someone who had contact with I-Click noticed our article and notified them immediately. We don’t know how many users have been affected, but we’re hoping that it won’t happen again. Thank you again to whomever helped us in getting our small plea of anti-spam noticed. Feel free to check out I-Click stores again, though maybe be a little wary of sharing your personal contact information for the time being. The original article that hopefully got their attention is after the jump.

If you thought that doing business with I-Click Digital Shop was going to end up being professional, discreet, and respectable, then you thought wrong. Up until very recently, The Technoclast and I-Click have had a decent consumer-retailer relationship going on, until they’ve decided to spam our inbox every hour on the hour. We’re more than a little annoyed that a well known company that we’ve entrusted with our well-guarded contact details would succumb to such ill-refute practices with our information. And mind you, that bowl we dropped our business card in included some well known public individuals – some we noticed are lawyers, doctors and even former congressmen. Imagine them checking their inbox to find 60+ messages from I-Click with exactly the same content image, with exactly one hour in between each message. Obviously this is a spam bot. And obviously, I-Click had no problems whatsoever in feeding people’s contact information into a deliberate script.

The e-mail blast started, at least for us, on October 28, 6:31PM. It contained an image to promote the opening of one of their stores. Exactly one hour later at 7:31, we got the same exact message. We figured it was just a fluke, so we let it go. But then came the third message, and the fourth, and then fifth, sixth. Congratulations I-Click! You are the first ever person/company to spam our GMail address – a distinction you should try to hide as much as you possibly can. Of course, we let them know immediately of our dismay in an e-mail – hoping to get them to fix it before we find it any more revolting than it already is.

To whom it may concern:

Sir/Ma’am, I am one of the consumers who have been enjoying the services of your store. However, I’d like to point out that since the last 6 hours today, you have been spamming my e-mail the same message about your grand opening sale every hour on the hour. That is 6 e-mails so far and counting. It is annoying and I would like for it to stop immediately. If not, I would have to take actions against it, and will ask for you to kindly remove me from any listing on your database. I would very much like to continue on as one of your valued customers, but let it be known that this e-mail spam is not helping.

Regards,

Alexei Rivera

www.thetechnoclast.com

Regardless of the unusual long weekend we’re facing right now which is conveniently just in time when this spam script has started, (past 6PM on Friday, October 28) there is no excuse for allowing such a retarded script to run – regardless of your office hours or not. It was not our doing why this spam bot started, so if you have to fly back from Hawaii to stop it, by hell you should. If I were running this company, I would pull people out of vacation and either fire them or have them fix this script on the spot. Because it is obviously is a script – nobody is sitting on a computer somewhere and sending these messages one at a time every exact hour. Which is even worse, because I-Click apparently cares so little about their customers that they would rather have a spam bot send you messages instead of having real people give you information about their promotions. Way to give out that personalized, well-cared-for feeling there, I-Click!

A small fraction of the spam shown here

At this time of writing, we currently have sixty (60) messages from their e-mail: marketing@iclickdigishop.com. There has been no reply to our complaint and we don’t believe we’ll ever get one. If they care, they might be able to stop this retarded nonsense when they get back to their offices and find out how stupid they’ve been. But the harm has been done. I-Click Digital Shop has lost one customer in us, and we hope this also convinces you to take your business elsewhere. If they could feed your information to a spam bot, who knows who or what else they’re giving our information to? We’re kind of worried we might be getting Viagra, penis enhancement, and Nigerian bank spam sometime soon because of how incredibly stupid I-Click guards their clients’ information. This sort of gross treatment of customers’ private information should not be handled any at all lightly. Of course, you could simply block them from ever sending you messages, but the harm has been done. That somebody out there who cares so little about your information will probably have inadvertently spread it through channels of ill-refute, much like most people with a spam bot would.

Ironically, they might have accomplished what the original e-mail intended to do: gain some publicity. We hope everyone makes sure they get the negative side of that though. Do us all a favor: don’t give your information out to these retards. Or better yet, don’t ever shop at I-Click anymore. Ever. Unless you like spam, Viagra, and penis enlargement.

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved. Please check out the first paragraph again to read what happened. Thanks!