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VMWare vs Parallels: Marketing Spam comparison
Just an annoyed rant - VMWare has really managed to annoy me lately. A long time ago, I downloaded one of their server versions for evaluation purposes. Since then, I have been receiving marketing emails from them, despite marking "no marketing emails" when I registered with them (I always do this on all sites). Lately, because my registered address is in China, they've started using a third party marketing company to send me chinese marketing emails. Thanks. They go straight to the dustbin unread, since I read chinese about 5-10x slower than English.
I finally got annoyed enough to go through the trouble of unsubscribing from their marketing list. This shouldn't have been necessary in the first place - I never agreed to let them send me these emails. Unsubscribing turned out to be multiple steps - you actually have to confirm that you want to opt out. After clicking on the unsubscribe url, they send me an email to confirm that I'm the guy who really wants to unsubscribe, then I have to click on that url again. I've done that, about 5 minutes of my life wasted (slow network speeds here). Bah. Let's see if I continue to receive spam from them.
On the other hand, another nice virtualization provider, Parallels has never spammed me, even though I've actually bought products from them. The only emails I've ever received from them were the purchase confirmation emails and directions on where to download their products.
Email marketing is cheap and sometimes powerful, but you really have to be careful to avoid annoying your potential customers. I wish people would pay more attention to this.
