Leading UK Merchants Condemned for Distributing Junk E-Mails

Spam Ratings, the spam-monitoring company has condemned top retailers in UK such as Mark & Spencer (M&S), Topshop and ASDA. The company, which measures the outbound spam volume of retailers, discovered that Topshop, M&S, and ASDA remained short of abiding by the spam rules which the Office of Information Commission and the Direct Marketing Association specified necessitating firms to acquire their customers' consent prior to enlisting them in their mailing lists.

Indeed, according to Spam Ratings, a few major firms can be easily compared with a botnet, as over 75% of e-mails that British businesses dispatch are unsolicited.

Curiously, the report that examined the e-mails, which 10,000 websites distributed over a time-interval of 12 months, found that 40% of those websites dispatched risk-prone e-mails and 30% dispatched unwanted messages from 3rd-parties. Of essential concern for Spam Ratings was the sale of consumer information that it stated reached a worrying level. Techeye.net reported this during the 2nd week of September 2010.

The company pointed out that since the above kind of e-mails arrived from trustworthy and reputed firms; a lot of recipients didn't view then as junk despite the messages complying with traditional spam descriptions as well as delivery mode.

Remarking about these interesting discoveries, Spam Ratings' Co-Founder Andy Yates stated that it was funny how a lot of Internet users seemed to bear with e-mail junk along with the daily risks and increasing trouble they brought. Webuser.co.uk published this during the 2nd week of September 2010.

Yates continued that the business of spam neither must be like that nor push itself to be so. Such e-mails really weren't any mystery. They arrived from websites to which users registered themselves to as they dispatched messages that weren't invited, or even bad traded on consumers' information with potentially destructive 3rd-parties, Yates explained.

Nonetheless, ASDA criticized Spam Ratings for making the complaints against it. As per the retailer, they always enquired from clients whether they wished getting e-mails from ASDA. Moreover, every e-mail they dispatched carried an option to get de-listed, while they never sold consumer information to intermediate entities, the retailer said. Techeye.net reported this.

Related article: Leading anti-spam Organizations Come Together To Fight Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 9/28/2010