Speaking of broken…

I’m receiving a lot more sales spam to my inbox at work these days, which is odd, because I don’t use that e-mail address to subscribe to anything. They’re legitimate sales pitches, but what’s astonishing to me is how bad some of them are.

I received one message inviting me to license reprints of an article.

Your organization was mentioned in the latest issue of The [Redacted] Report, and we’ve attached a complimentary copy in pdf format for you to review.

Kindly note that this issue is sent to you personally, not to your company. It is a violation of copyright law to reproduce it (print it out), forward it to another email address, post it on your company’s intranet, or post it on any other server at your company.

[Deleted: Sales pitch for reprints]

I respect copyright. I really do. Copyright law is broken and needs to be re-written to reflect the 21st century, but content creators should have the right to be compensated for their work. But I’m thinking that threatening prospective customers probably isn’t working out so well for [Redacted] Report.

Moreover, [Redacted] Report hadn’t qualified me as a lead before they made the pitch. They don’t know if I’m the right person to buy the reprints. If I’m not, then they’ve guaranteed  that they’re not going to make the sale, because there’s no way for me to get approval to spend the money.

• Can’t print it out and show it to my boss.
• Can’t forward the e-mail for approval.
• Can’t post in on the intranet where somebody might see it and want to pay for reprints.
• Can’t even save the e-mail, because that’s on another server.

Delete!

Stating the obvious: Don’t threaten your customers.

Photo credit: Jon Rawlinson