Five weeks ago I changed my email address for MySpace and that should usually do to stop receiving emails on the previous address. To make matters more complicated, my preference is to receive notifications but not MySpace’s newsletter and one would think that should prevent the reception of promo blasts. Well, not quite, it seems ;-).

I was more than astonished not only to receive a newsletter I did not ask for today, but also one that was sent my old email address. Oddly enough, I did not receive another copy at my currently used email address, just at the old one. Things happen, and sometimes it helps to utilise the unsubscribe link. Unfortunately their implementation of opt-out does not involve removing an email address but providing a link to one’s profile preferences, which of course ensures the problem will persist. Newsletters are bulk email and each copy that reaches an inbox that did not subscribe to it is unsolicited. That makes their misdirected newsletters spam. Therefore, I flagged this message as spam in my affected Gmail account and wrote to their support stuff making them aware of the issue. Not that I expected any reaction, other than some boilerplate responses that do not fit to the actual situation, but at least future mailings will be dealt with appropriately by Gmail’s junk filters.

In any case, the outcome will have the final say as to whether I will continue using their services in the future. It does not lack some irony that a company which tries to position itself as “anti spam” fails at trivial things like mailing list management. So far, I’ve never encountered a mailing list that continued to deliver to an old email address, but then again there is always a first time…