Chester’s competition in MEW 233

[Brian WoodParticipant @brianwood45127]

I am not usually one to moan and bleat, but I was annoyed to find that entry on-line to the competition gave no chance of avoiding the advertising opportunity for spam and unwanted mail shots made available to Chester and others.

That option was possible to those using a postal entry.

Terms and conditions were NOT viewable where such options could be selected and it was a case of either submit your entry or pass the competition by.

Poorly planned I fear

Brian

[Brian WoodParticipant @brianwood45127]

Prize draw entry

[Gordon WParticipant @gordonw]

No Brian, well planned, that's what these "competitions" are for. I'm still trawling through wikipedia looking for the answer.

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

The answer is 42.

[Frances IoMParticipant @francesiom58905]

Brian – say the offer is worth ?250 and you harvest 1000 email address of those now known to be interested in such tools – a much cheaper way of gaining a mail (or spam) list can’t be found especially now under EU rules that require explicit opt in – get yourself a throwaway email address and use that if you want to play this game

[Brian WoodParticipant @brianwood45127]

Frances,

For this entry you would need a false address, phone number and throw away email address, all of which would no doubt render the entry invalid.

My point in raising the topic was that different rules apply for postal entry where opting in was a feature—why just that route, or it is simply that no one uses the post anymore?

Brian

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

You've already agreed the the MyTimeMedia group contacting you by joining the forum. The competition T&Cs just allow us to let Chester know who has entered.

Neil

[David Clark 13Participant @davidclark13]

Hi Brian Where would they send the prize if the address was fake?

[mark costello 1Participant @markcostello1]

Boy, wouldn't that be My luck!

[Brian WoodParticipant @brianwood45127]

Neil, David and Mark,

Perhaps I had not fully appreciated the competition is being hosted by MTM with Chester providing the prize. The disparity over personal data use was the thing I was drawing attention to.

As I said earlier, I suspect an entry with false details would be rejected anyway as being invalid so the question of a homeless prize probably wouldn't arise.

Brian

[Frances IoMParticipant @francesiom58905]

I didn’t suggest using a false address (my postal spam has dropped to nothing in the UK where I spend half my time except the mass unstamped mailings delivered by postie but your own experience may differ especially if you ever give to charity) but I would never give out my telephone number to any marketing organisation tho being able to give a Manx number that appears to be part of UK system adds a little frisson as the cost of calling the IoM from UK is quite substantial!) – re emails mytimemedia would appear to be on my Manx ISP’s black list for spam so suspect it must have earned this reputation in the past – getting the acceptance email for the forum proved quite tricky

Edited By Frances IoM on 11/09/2015 19:28:20

[David Clark 13Participant @davidclark13]

From my time as editor, postal entries to competitions were in single figures.

Online entry was published on competition websites for anybody to enter and quite a few non model engineers entered but entries were, I think, still quite low. Well worth a try at winning.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

It seems the competition websites haven't found the competition so it's escaped the compulsive win-a-cappuccino-machine-every-month crew.

Enough entries to keep Chester happy but not so many that it isn't worth entering.

Neil

[HopperParticipant @hopper]

Posted by Frances IoM on 11/09/2015 11:16:06:
….- get yourself a throwaway email address and use that if you want to play this game

^^^ This.

[Gas_mantle.Participant @gas_mantle]

Personally I can't see what the problem is, if you want the chance to win a free machine it's not unreasonable to be expected to abide by some conditions set by the competition organiser or the supplier of the prize. Let's face it no-one is forcing anyone to enter – you have the choice of whether you think the conditions set are appropriate to the possible win, and if you think not then you don't enter.

As for the differing conditionality between postal and email entries, you can always enter by post and risk the potential loss of the price of the stamp should you not win the prize.

[NJHParticipant @njh]

Very well argued Peter – my view exactly.

Norman

[Frances IoMParticipant @francesiom58905]

a throwaway email address for those unsure of term is one that you will only use for a single purpose – ie post competition closure having checked for any notification you just forget about it – standard operating procedure for many such problems where the cost of transmitting spam is negligible (or for bot nets free) but the cost of receiving it especially on mobile phones but also your personal time is measurable -the misuse of personal data by marketers existed long before the recent charity mail saga but control esp in EU is coming albeit slowly – Chester already have my details as I’ve ordered from them so far without any unwanted communication on their part but other companies I’ve had to put on a blacklist in my mail program as they just do not stop (especially true of non-UK based companies or those UK companies now run under an American CEO who seem to think US disregard for privacy is universal)

[Brian WoodParticipant @brianwood45127]

Perhaps if I may I will explain the background to my concerns. About 3 years ago my sister moved down from Scotland, staying briefly with us while the final arrangemements were completed on her new home nearby. She set up a mail re-direction using my address as the new 'care of' delivery point. Crucially she failed to spot a vital box on the PO form which needed attention.

In her time up there she had contributed to a number of charities and before long this tide of mail appeared here. Wheat was sorted from chaff which went back but after 18 months of this a new wave started with her apparently resident here with my address shown as her permanent address. All the usual ploys of 'Not at this address' and 'Refused, return to sender' failed to choke this lot off, one outfit in particular and it took the action of writing 'deceased' on the envelopes and returning the junk before it finally stopped. The whole process took two and a half years

Maybe my sensitivity to these mailing lists and how they get sold around can now be seen in context.

I do of course accept and thank you all for your comments on the topic, the choice of entry, conditions accepted, is for the individual to decide and I propose to say no more having made my decision on the rules of the game.

Brian.

[AjohnwParticipant @ajohnw51620]

The should be an option to drop out on all mail shots. I just use that. It even worked on ebay once I found out how to do it.

I rely on filtering emails to various folders. One filter I use is if the from is in my address book. If it is it goes to my inbox. That won't suite many people as it means restricting what goes in it. Actually nothing else gets into my inbox. Ebay emails are filtered into an ebay folder. Paypal another. I tend to keep the paypal ones for a long time. Periodically I clean out the ebay ones, some I block select and delete as soon as they arrive without even reading them. Anything else goes into a folder that I call MayBeTrash. It's easy to scan those for who they are from and react accordingly. Sometime an email arrives that I want to keep for some reason, say account details, forums, shops etc. I manually move these to a separate folder. Works for me. If I'm away for a week I might come back to 150 plus unread emails. It just takes a couple of mins to deal with them.

I use separate email addresses for different things all via my ISP. Near 100% one that is an easy target for spammers. That's not too bad these days because they block spammers pretty quickly. In fact it's rare to get one on it now probably because most use something more complicated these days. Another trick some people use to filter out things they probably wont want to read is to play with the name field in the email address. Add an initial etc. I sometimes add my surname, mostly I don't.

One thing I have noticed a number of times is when I communicate with a private individual for the first time. It's not that unusual to start receiving spam. I usually tell them but it generally drops off quickly. I used to bounce ones that came with a virus from these sources. One guy sent me a message telling me not to send him my viruses – it came from him.

I also have my email set up for plain text. Actually I never send html. The reason I also receive set to plain text is that it then takes 2 clocks to fully decode html. The 1st one decodes it so that it can be read. The 2nd one allows it to load external references – that's the one that allows senders to see that it's been read. Ok in some cases and not a good idea in others.

John

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[Tim StevensParticipant @timstevens64731]

I would like to have a go but the questions are just Soooo hard. Don't you think?

Tim

[Frances IoMParticipant @francesiom58905]

John W1
you approach to requiring prior communication fails in some common cases – eg my public email address which has been on web for now approaching 20 years gets 20x as much spam as real traffic – however it is effectively despammed and then forwarded to me – my reply does not originate from the well known address – this I think is quite common in some organisations where a well known inbox fronts various responders

using plain text only – def blocking HTML, javascript + images leads to a much safer email system but as recently found on Android a bug in a image rendering program combined with auto opening of certain attachments leads to easy hackable phones outside of control of the user – one would have thought the industry had learnt from Microsofts stupidity with autorun insertion of CDs etc

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