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The irony of the fact that my trip to email hell for the past two days was caused by a PR company is not lost.
But that’s pretty much the only funny thing about the “mistake” Adicio.com made when they sent out 3200+ emails to an OPEN list of PR Week newsletter subscribers and then re-sent that message and the passwords of everyone on the list to each person as many as 1000 times over the next 24 hours.
Adicio issued an apology, but didn’t pull the plug on the spam, which began on Tuesday continued to flow until late Wednesday. Compounding the issue, many people hit “reply all” when they complained about the spam, sending thousands more emails. Calls to Adicio’s office were handled totally ineffectively.
PR Week has yet to issue an official apology. To put it mildly, the way PR Week is handling the issue sucks.
Hint: When you do apologize, don’t send it by email. Your email is black-listed.
What should PR Week do?
o APOLOGIZE profusely
o The errant email was about an opportunity to win a free iPod. Consider sending one to everyone you spammed.
o Offer to pay for computer consultants needed to get the email systems of those who where spammed back up. Surely you have business liability insurance. Because you are liable for interruption of business, even though your mistake was not intentional or malicious.
o Re-think your emailing program. Nobody wants to receive email blasts anymore.
All of this spam rendered Entourage on my Mac unusable and I don’t have an IT department who can handle this, so I have spent many hours backing up and transferring my address book and data to other gMail. But the contents of my Entourage folders, where I have the bad habit of storing a lot of emails, is lost until I can get Entourage running again.
I am told that the fastest and best solution to the Entourage problem is to buy Office 2008 for Mac and install it so i won’t have to re-build the database and lose all my saved mail and folders. I expect PR Week to pay for the software.
The only reason I use Entourage at all is that I like its interface better than gMail’s, but I am quickly growing to love gMail, especially now that one can use one’s own domain with it.