Company engages in spamming people
Company engages in spamming people. I've received 4 emails regarding painting quotes to an IT business.
Discussed with company who advised spam emails are when they send out 10,000+ but my understanding that sending any emails to an end user that has NOT requested it would be unsolicited and therefore spam.
Reply from Intently.co
Hello John, and thanks for your call this afternoon.
I am genuinely sorry that we annoyed you with the 4 emails that we sent to you. I can see why - sending our buyer's request for a handyman to your PC repair company was completely inappropriate. Per your request, we have removed all information about your business from our system.
The Wikipedia definition of spam is: the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing), or simply sending the same message over and over to the same user.
Firstly, we did not send the handyman request to a large number of recipients - we sent it to a very small number of recipients, namely a handful of handymen (and a PC repair company - sorry) in Horsham. Secondly, it was not advertising or for a prohibited purpose. If you had been a handyman (and I'm sorry again that we got this wrong), then you would have been receiving a genuine request for your services, and it would have been free for you to respond and potentially win the work. This is most definitely not advertising - we weren't advertising anything, promoting anything, asking you to buy anything, or doing anything else dodgy like phishing or malware. We were simply trying to connect someone who wanted a handyman with a handyman.
As for sending the same message over and over to the same user, we sent 4 messages to 3 email addresses, with all 3 email addresses being managed by your good self. In technical terms this means that there was one "over and over" because we sent the same message to one of those email addresses twice, with the other email addresses receiving a single message. The duplicated email appears to be a case of our system failing to spot that a mixed case email address and a lower case email address were actually the same email address. I do accept that emailing multiple email addresses in the same small business could be quite annoying, and because we sent you a handyman request, it must have looked very much like spam. I am not denying that as far as you are concerned, this was "spam" because you personally received the same email 4 times. All I am trying to do is point out we really don't fall into the spam definition above - I hate spam too, and the intention of Intently is to connect real people to one another so they can do business together, not to annoy people.
As you could see from our call, we take complaints seriously. While you were on the call with us, we discussed the details we held about your company and we initiated the removal of these during the call too. We also have an "unsubscribe" option in our emails and this works correctly. You also asked if you could make a GDPR request, and you can still do that if you want to.
Kind regards and sorry for spoiling your afternoon,
Neil Harris
