A report out last week showed that Yahoo was measuring the ‘spamyness’ of emails sent out by companies and printing ‘Warning: Unsolicited Emails against the search results for that company.
This is an unwanted and unsafe intervention. There can be many, many reasons why a responsible company with a perfectly respectable privacy policy can be caught unawares.
Example:
We get well over 1,000 emails every day, many of them Spam but once in a while there are genuine emails in there. The levels of Spam received meant we had to take the decision not to read any email sent to a non-registered email address i.e. spamspamspam@selfcateringhols.com will not be read, neither will dougandrew@selfcateringhols.com. We took this decision knowing that some people do still hand type an email address and send a genuine email which has a typo in it. Not wanting these people to feel they’d sent us a message and not had a response we set up an auto-reply to say that their email had not been delivered – but because we were getting spoofed emails from every Tom Dick and Harry our auto-responses to them were then being picked up as Spam! We have since stopped the auto response so that genuine emailers may well think we’re ignoring them, but what can you do – it is a no-win situation.
We never, ever send out an newsletter email to anyone unless they are registered with the site and have opted to receive them. Every newsletter has a link to auto-unsubscribe – and yet despite this we have had cases where a recipient has reported us for Spam to one of the ubiquitous Spam lists and we had to defend our position.
Corporations have a real responsibility – to act responsibly. The average person online – i.e. someone who uses the Internet for personal reasons but just wants it to ‘work’ without questioning ‘how’ it works – will simply believe what they say. For a major company to step in an brand another company as a Spammer, according to the results of an automated algorithm, is a very dangerous step and one that will have very real consequences to potentially legitimate companies.
This is a step in the wrong direction – it will never, ever, be possible to make the Internet 100% safe to individuals – without squeezing out all but the major corporations (and who’s to say THAT’s safe!!). People need to take responsibility for themselves and stop relying upon third parties to say what is right and what is wrong, or what is safe and what isn’t – there’s enough information out there on just about any company you care to mention if you can be bothered to check for yourself.
Companies House website problems
Companies House have a new* website http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/index.shtml – which unfortunately doesn’t work.
I tried to access the WebCheck service which allows you to view basic information about a company, but the link returns you to the same page you were on before despite it having a different URL.
The search box crashes to an unformatted white screen with an error message, regardless of the search criteria used.
Working as I do to maintain a website I am all to conscious that problems can occur – but these are two issues affecting the core functionality of the website, something that should not occur for any company, let along an institution of this size.
* it’s new to me – I followed a clearly now outdated link from our own site and was re-directed, but it may have been running a while