Unsolicited real-Mail

Posted by donal on May 30th, 2008 filed in Rants, computers

The world of computing has a lot of flaws, from software and hardware problems like this Fedora installation, which thinks it hasn’t been booted in 47814 days, or just under 140 years, if you ignore the 29th of February during leap years.

Ignoring leap years, this pc hasn’t been booted in 140 years!

However, I’ve recently started to experience a new annoyance: spam. Not the “enlarge your penis” e-mails that Gmail is so adept at filtering, or the processed food I have thankfully never had to rely on, but real-world, in-through-the-Goddamned-letterbox unsolicited mail. For God’s sake, it’s even in an envelope.

Who’s it from, one might ask. Well, today, and not for the first time, I might add, I have been the lucky recipient of a friendly notice from the Domain Registry of America, letting me know that my domain names are to expire in the coming months. Just to be clear, my domains aren’t register with the Domain Registry of America, nor, apart from this unsolicited mail, have I ever heard of them. I’ve taken some pictures of the letters below. Two things I should explain: the first is that I’ve blurred one of the domain names since I registered it for a friend, and it’s not mine; the second is that I don’t have a scanner, so the picture quality is pretty poor (they were taken on my mobile phone).

The header of the letter sent to me by the “Domain Registry of America”.

The letter looks fairly impressive. It has a nice header, and, if you weren’t on the ball, you could easily mistake it for an invoice. There is one sentence in bold, which I forgot to photograph, but reads “This notice is not a bill“. I feel this is pretty sneaky, to be honest. It’s the kind of tactics that would put me off a company for good. Even the fact they harvested my whois info is bad enough.

They have the gall to request a reply by a certain date!

They’re also pretty pushy, with this Reply Requested By date, which reinforces the sense that this letter is from your registrar. There are a few more photos below:

They wouldn’t even pay for the postage!

Here, the company has the neck to not only ask me to renew my domains with them, but to pay my own postage. I’m not going to jot down my credit card info on their form and then send it off, anyway, but if I was stupid enough, I’d have hoped that the Domain Registry of America would pay the cost of the stamp. That way I could tape their envelope to a cinderblock and send it off. Notice also that the Domain Registry of America is based in London.

Of course, those frienly folks couldn’t just let me renew my online presence, they are offering my the chance to expand it.

They also suggest other domains I might want to register, which is nice, because I would never have thought of registering my domain with a different tld. On top of the fact that these guys are physically spamming me, their rates are terrible. €43 for 2 years is almost 3 times what I currently pay. For any yanks reading, that’s just over $66 at today’s rates, or $33 a year for a domain. What a rip-off!

I’m hoping this kind of marketing, real world junk mail originating from data gleamed from the internet, doesn’t become prevalent. Unlike e-mail spam, there is real cost to the recipient associated with real-world junk mail, in that I have to physically recycle it.

</rant>