Rich Seymour’s stochastic statements.

File under comic relief.

Background: I have perhaps bought 2 or 3 pairs of shoes for myself from the 70% off section of Designer Shoe Warehouse in my life. They at some point cajoled me to sign up with an email address. I signed up with myemailaddress+dsw@gmail.com. Specifically so I could filter them out, with the +dsw appended, legally, to my email. It’s something you can do to email, try emailing yourself at youremail+SeeIToldYouSo@example.com and you will get the email. This is generally speaking, some use a minus sign, it’s all explained on Wikipedia’s Email entry. So… fast forward to today. I just can’t stand that they still email me… but when I click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email, I get the following from DSW.com:

Could not match subscriber ID to the e-mail.

Kudos on supporting plus addressing DSW, but quintuple anti-kudos for not supporting unsubscribing with plus addressing. Classic web/db design pitfalls, but since I worked in teh interweb business in ‘99-’03, I feel I can vent about this with some authority. Written in all-caps into DSW’s woefully ill-designed web form:

PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE [redacted]+DSW@GMAIL.COM FROM YOUR EMAIL LIST. WHATEVER ILL EDUCATED WEB PROGRAMMER YOU HAVE CAN’T SEEM TO RECOGNIZE THAT BLAH+BLAH@EXAMPLE.COM EMAIL ADDRESSES ARE VALID PER THE RESPECTIVE IEEE RFCS. UNSUBSCRIBE IT NOW. YOU’VE NEVER EVEN GOT THE FACT THAT I’M A MALE AND NOT INTERESTED IN WOMEN’S SHOE OFFERINGS. MY GIRLFRIEND TELLS ME ENOUGH ABOUT WOMEN’S SHOES. I DO NOT NEED YOUR EMAIL. BEST, RICH

This is how I blow off steam on occasion. Now back to figure out how to do data pumping(TM) in this multi-threaded application I’m working on.

PS Obviously, I can just filter the emails from them to Trash based on this, but… yeah… I just find the whole conundrum hilarious. Me and no doubt… one to two other people.

posted by Rich at 8:55 am
|