Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Fri, July 1, 2011 00:47, Jordon Bedwell wrote:

> *All* social networking sites do the same thing.  They dive into your
> email, grab a list and then spam people.  Since I've never invited my
> contacts to socialise with me on websites in mass (mostly because I
> don't trust such tools to scrap my email and contacts list for an
> internal database for more than what the tool is designed for) I have no
> true idea if they allow you to modify that spam list before they go out,
> but if they don't allow you to then that's not the users fault, that's
> the systems fault so you need to take it up with Linkedin and Twitter,
> not Calc.

*All* social networking sites do the same thing. They dive into your
email, grab a list, AND ASK YOU TO TICK A BOX NEXT TO EVERY ADDRESS IN
THAT LIST BUT ONLY IF YOU WANT TO SPAM THAT USER. To make things easier,
all of them also include a "Select All" button. Obviously.

> No, I'm not defending spam, or making up an excuse for him, I'm just
> saying it's not fair he gets the heat for a failure of another.

It is fair that he gets a bit of flak. He clicked on "Select All", and
then he neglected to check the list and unselect those addresses that
aren't real persons.
It is unfair that he gets so much flak. See below.

> I'm wondering if anybody has ever even attempted to contact these
> companies and ask them to start a absolute "do not email" list that
> users can report so that they don't accidentally spam mailing lists.

It's called a Robinson list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_list

> I've forwarded this email to twitter support and linkedin support.
>
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.user/244817
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.user/239119
>
> Maybe Twitter and linked in and fix this for us and stop the emails to
> the list from accidentally going through by checking the list for
> certain emails.

I doubt it, because in this case it is clearly user error.

But really, why such harsh reactions? Someone messed up, too bad. I bet
that he won't do that again. Can we now just continue with our regular
broadcasts?