Journal: LOVEFiLM Appears to Condone Affiliate Spam

I received an email to one of my hundreds of spam-trap addresses a few days ago, promoting a free trial of the LOVEFiLM service (UK version of Netflix). Ironic, as only a few days ago I was promoting the service myself on my blog as I love it so much. "This will be easy", I thought to myself, and fired off an email to their Customer Service team with full headers and a description as to how the email had arrived.

Good deed done for the day, or so I thought, until I received this gem in reply:

Thank you for your email.

I would like to apologise for the inconvenience that this matter has caused you.

Will you please let us know what the email address is where you have received these emails in order for us to look into this for you?

We hope to hear from you soon in order for us to look into this for you.

Oh dear. I've just supplied them with the full email headers that quite clearly show which address the email was sent to. But, no matter. I fired off a polite email advising which address the spam had been sent to, and thought little more of it. But then I received this:

I can confirm that we do not sell our Customers details on to Third Party Websites - as per our security policy.

It would seem that you have been contacted by an affiliate website. To unsubcribe from these emails I would advise that you click on the unsubscribe link on the email.

Sigh. Someone isn't getting it. I emailed back a terse but to the point response, trying to hammer home the point:

The point is this is a spam email sent to an email account that only exists to be scraped up by spammers. It has never been used by a human and therefore cannot subscribe to anything. I take it from your response you condone this behavior?

This I find unacceptable.

I cannot make it any clearer, can I? A few hours later, clearly still not making any headway, I received this:

Thank you for your recent email, I would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

The only way in which emails will be sent out to you, will be if you have subscribed to an affiliate website of Lovefilm as the email address is not registered on our systems. We do advise that you unsibscribe from the affiliate website in order for these emails to not be sent anymore.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can assist you with.

I can't fault them for politeness, but it's like talking to a brick wall. (Are we getting bored yet?) I replied back with:

Can I suggest you read up on spam and email harvesting. This email address has never been used. It was generated purely to see who sucked it off the website it had been burried on. I can only assume from your evasive handling of this issue that LOVEFiLM condone their 'affiliates' spamming for business? I am highly disappointed in this and will be taking the matter further.

It's clear that they didn't, because this morning I woke up to this in reply:

As previously stated Lovefilm or their affiliate websites will only send out emails regarding the service if you have subscribed to the website with the email address. I will pass the information on that you have provided in order for us to have a look into this matter further.

I have had enough now. This will be my final email reply to them on the subject:

"Lovefilm or their affiliate websites will only send out emails regarding the service if you have subscribed to the website with the email address."

And I am telling you that isn't possible, because that email address has never been used by a human being. It is used by a computer, to sit and wait and see who emails it. The only place that email address can be found is by spammers sucking email addresses off of web pages (the particular address in question was buried in a bunch of commented out HTML code on a high-traffic website).

I don't mean to cause a fuss over this, but most companies seem quite pleased and receptive when I point out their 'affiliates' are sending spam email in their name, for their own gain. This exchange will be handed to The Office of the Information Commissioner with a view to examining any potential breaches of The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. Organisations can only send unsolicited marketing by electronic mail, such as email and text message, where the individual has specifically requested it, and as I keep repeatedly pointing out, the circumstances under which the email I am complaining about arrived, it cannot have "specifically requested it".

I will be talking to the ICO on Monday, and I trust this journal entry will be useful to others to see just what LOVEFiLM's business practices are really like when it comes to spam.