Thanks for selling my information, Yahoo

About a year and a half ago, a friend and I decided to start a tshirt business on a whim. Our plan was to sell hyper-targeted tshirts to folks using Facebook's self-service ad platform. Our target market was management consultants, a market which we sized to be about $500 in annual revenue (if we achieved 100% marketshare) and we would have negative gross margins. Seemed like an inspired idea!

That very morning, we bought the domain and set up a store using Yahoo Stores to power our ecommerce site. Within 3 hours of thinking up the idea, we had our business up and running; 8020 tshirts was born!

By the afternoon we lost interest in the idea; 8020 tshirts was dead! After letting the site sit around for a while, we cancelled the account with Yahoo Stores (after paying them about $150 bucks in fees). So this business only lasted about 3 hours and the only one who ever knew about it was Yahoo.

But why the heck do I get junk mail almost every week addressed to 8020 tshirts? Credit card applications, small busines banking promotions, all sorts of crap. It's rather annoying actually (and a constant reminder of our sad business failure!).

I can only assume that Yahoo sold our information to a mailing list company. That seems like a pretty low move. I could never see Google doing something as greedy and short-sighted as that.

What gives Yahoo?

FanBridge, stop spamming the crap out of me

Every day I get about 3 or 4 pieces of spam from FanBridge, the email delivery service for bands.

Normally email delivery services like Constant Contact, iContact etc make sure that you opt in to the list before they deliver email from their customers to you. They provide the valuable service of mail deliverability by ensuring that users want to receive these emails.

FanBridge claims on on it's website that users must opt in to receive messages, but this is a bold faced lie. So FanBridge, how about it? Will you stop spamming the crap out of everybody?