I once got into trouble with one of these unwanted newsletters. A design agency in Argentina was doing the mass mailing their work to design blog authors in an effort to spread the word about the work they had done. It was a fairly large agency with big clients, one of those clients was Unilever. I started by requesting to be removed from the list, this went well for a couple of weeks, but then (some intern, I suppose) would pick it up again and put it in their database. I got tired of this game and marked it as spam, but somehow it was still going through my inbox. By the fourth time this happened, I grew angry, so I thought about a way to get the message through that their emailing tactics weren’t welcome.

I searched through LinkedIn for the highest level of Unilever I could find, and I struck gold: I got the email of the VP of Marketing of Unilever for Argentina. I wrote him an email, with cc to the owner of the Argentinian agency. I wrote to him as if he was a friend, something along the lines of…

Dear *****
Your design agency in Argentina, *****, has been spamming me about the work that they have done for Unilever. I wouldn’t like to have my brand associated with such seedy marketing tactics. If I were you, I would drop them as a provider. Please take care good friend.

The owner went bonkers, I just replied that he should search through their email to see how many times I had asked to be removed from their list. I guess they finally implemented a blacklist because I didn’t receive another email from them.