Many moons ago I had a subscription to MacWorld through Zinio. Zinio is a service that gives you an electronic version of a magazine, and the subscription I got was free with some Mac purchase I made in August 2004. It actually wasn’t that bad a product, but the funky player was a hassle. I stopped the subscription in August 2005. Since then I’ve gotten two messages about the Zinio player and conflicts with various Apple QuickTime updates, which were fine.
Tonight I got an offer from Zinio for several magazines, two of which I’ve never heard of before. The email message was notCAN-SPAM compliant, they did not include their postal mailing address in the message. It also said this at the bottom of the message:
You are receiving this email at (my address), because you have opted in to receive promotions and updates from Zinio. Update your email preferences.
The “Update your email preferences” was a link to the Zinio web site. I logged into my account, and discovered I already had opted out of Zinio’s marketing drivel (click to enlarge):
I’ve emailed Zinio at their customer support address, pointing them to this page. I doubt they’ll respond. But the helpful hint would be if you have any investments in Zinio, you should get out now; they’re getting desperate for customers; so desperate that they are breaking the law to sell product. I won’t be surprised if they get sold or go bankrupt sometime soon. And if you are a current Zinio customer, you may want to cancel your subscription now so you can get a refund for issues you haven’t received yet.
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Posted under Spam, Technology
This post was written by Michael Clark on September 7, 2007
