Posted on by Olav Vitters

Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Didn’t like our spam? Click the opt-out!”

Just got an unsollicited email from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Apparently people are encouraged to get as much money donated as possible. As a result, some person seem to have collected email addresses and send out various of such ‘give me money’ emails.

Complained about it, but response is that I should click the opt-out link. Ehr? I didn’t want this, so I want the person stopped from sending this.

This is not the behaviour I’m used to from other net citizens.

Wondering whether to block the IP address (and thus EFF) from sending stuff to @gnome.org. I guess I’ll have announce it before implementing it.

Suggest if you wanted to donate to the EFF to reconsider.

7 Replies to “Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Didn’t like our spam? Click the opt-out!””

  1. Wow, that’s not the kind of behavior I would expect from the EFF (I am a longtime EFF member and supporter), so I strongly suspect this comes from a onetime misunderstanding. I cast my vote AGAINST blocking them from sending to @gnome.org email addresses. Would you like for me to investigate what happened? If so, contact me.

    1. I was pretty annoyed when sending the abuse email, but didn’t rant. I don’t get why I get the “click the opt-out” response. I made it clear that abuse should be acted upon.

      I get enough of these “a friend sent you” emails from people I know, so getting them from people I don’t know is over my tolerance limit.

      I’ll fwd you the spam. The text version also looks like crap (HTML in there). The email is really similar to spam in that way.

      1. Olav forwarded the email to me; the From line & email address was from a person I’ll call Member, since s/he is probably an EFF member.

        I forwarded it to EFF and Aaron Jue there immediately replied:

        “Hey Sumana. This is totally unacceptable. Please extend our apologies (and sympathies) to Olav. We’ll need to stop [Member]’s spam at the very least, so thank you for telling us about the problem. We’re going to have a powwow to discuss the most efficient solution, but again I’m sorry for the trouble/annoyance/angst that we may have caused inadvertently and we’ll do our best to turn it around.”

  3. Are you sure it’s actually *from* EFF, and not some kind of scam? Unsolicited email,, HTML formatting… doesn’t really sound like their style…

  4. Received the spam as well and I wouldn’t hesitate to block until we get a better response at least. This is definitely not the kind of behaviour to encourage.

    Thanks.

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