t 'n t luoma

About a year ago I wrote about MemTurbo requiring me to accept spam if I want product updates. If you read the whole piece you’ll also see the lousy way that they responded when I questioned them about the policy.

Well, a year has passed and all I have gotten is more junk. In fact I am no longer even using MemTurbo. After I moved away from Windows 98 I no longer felt that it was needed.

Tonight I got another message, claiming to be from MemTurbo Customer Updates with a Subject: line Important Information for MemTurbo Owners. It had nothing to do with MemTurbo. It was just a ploy to try to get me to buy more software (they were offering a discount to MemTurbo owners, I’ll grant them that much).

I can’t remember the last time I actually received an update from them that was about MemTurbo, so I went to their MemTurbo download page and saw that the current version was released on September 2nd, 2000. So I have to ask myself, Is it worth it to keep myself on their so-called MemTurbo update list when all I get is junk about other programs that I don’t need? And the answer is no.

When I complained about this last year, the support person asked me, So you’d like continuing ongoing support and updates for free, forever, without any chance that we can obtain more business from you? Ok, I’ll make a note of that. I responded by saying that I never asked for continuing support or updates for free, what I asked for was a notice of updates. That is what they told me I was signing up for. Instead I get spam, but no updates on the actual program.

Oh, and just in case anyone wants to debate whether it was spam, here is what SpamAssassin thought of the message

X-Spam-Score: 8 (********) BANG_GUARANTEE, BANG_MORE, GUARANTEE, HTML_30_40, HTML_FONT_BIG, HTML_FONT_COLOR_BLUE, HTML_FONT_COLOR_GREEN, HTML_FONT_COLOR_RED, HTML_FONT_COLOR_UNSAFE, HTML_MESSAGE, HTML_SHOUTING3, LIMITED_TIME_ONLY, NO_QS_ASKED

Note that anything which scores a 4 or greater in SpamAssassin has always been spam, 100% of the time since I have used it, and you will see this is not a borderline case.

So I will give up on the MemTurbo mailing list. As I said, in my experience I have not needed it since I left Windows 98