Forbes.com is a spammer

Once upon a time, I registered with Forbes.com.  I can’t remember why I did; I might have subscribed to their physical magazine and thought the website would also be useful, or maybe I read an interesting article there and came to the same conclusion.

I also signed up for some of their newsletters.

I got tired of their newsletters some months later, and so I unsubscribed to all of them via my “preferences” page at their site.

They continued to e-mail me their newsletters.

I returned to the site, verified I wasn’t subscribed to any newsletters, and decided to give them a few more days.  (I thought, maybe they’re an old-fashioned shop.  Maybe they use magtape to move information between their servers…)

But they continued to e-mail me their newsletters.

I went back to the site, and again submitted my preferences page with none of the boxes checked.

They continued to e-mail me their newsletters.

Now I can no longer remember my Forbes.com account name.  Why is this a problem?  Their site lets you recover a lost password, but not a lost account name!  You’re SOL without your account name, because you need it to log in or request a password change. Duh!

There’s so many things broken here that I will list only the top four:

1. Their membership pages’ UX is poorly designed
2. They don’t respect their users’ preferences.  And so they’re a spammer, even though they’re a large respected company with a respected name
3. They make it harder than it should be to unsubscribe. I don’t believe it needs to be “one click only,” but this is ridiculous
4. I am a failtard for not keeping my registration e-mail.  I’m sure I didn’t because this was a well-known and respectable site, so I thought I didn’t need to keep the registration mail.  I am an idiot

Today, I sent an e-mail to their customer service address:

Hi, I’m trying to completely unsubscribe to all of your newsletters.  Please don’t take this personally. 🙂

Can you unsubscribe me from everything?  I’ve forgotten my account name, and your site doesn’t give me a way to retrieve my account name (grrrrrrr!), and so I need your help.

Thanks,

John DeRosa