Essentially, I am now being stalked by a shop.

Five years ago, I subscribed to Amazon.co.uk’s e-mail newsletter because I thought it might be useful. It was. I thought it might alert me to offers I’d be interested in. It did. It has since become less useful. To illustrate why it is less useful now, and because I like them, here is a graph:

GRAPH!

You may notice that December 2009 is not included on this graph. So far this month, I’ve had 9 e-mails, excluding ones related to orders. That’s equivalent to almost exactly 20 for the month as a whole, but I thought it likely they’d subside around Christmas, so it seemed fairest not to include it. Even without this datum, there’s a pretty clear trend: Amazon have stopped emailing me none-to-two times a month and taken to emailing me nine-to-twelve times a month. In the last week, Amazon have sent me six promotional e-mails. Their average for December is one every 36 hours or so. This graph reminds me of the terrifying one from An Inconvenient Truth. If it carries on at this rate then before too long it’ll catch up with the now glacially slow increase in my GMail storage quota.

Amazon have been spectacularly unhelpful in this regard. I e-mailed them about it and they said:

Dear Customer Thank you for writing to Amazon.co.uk with your enquiry. I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused in this regard. I understand from your email that you are receiving more promotional emails everyday. Please understand that these are automated and system generated emails. Unfortunately we do not provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer. We do have an option to unsubscribe from the mailing list. If you would us to remove your email from the mailing list, please confirm using the link below: http://www.amazon.co.uk/email As an Amazon.co.uk customer or subscriber, you can receive e-mail updates about important functionality changes to the website, new Amazon.co.uk services, and special offers we believe would be beneficial to you. Thank you for shopping at Amazon.co.uk. Did we answer your question?

Well, no, it didn’t (and your link didn’t work).

I want my old, useful e-mail alerts back. I don’t want to run and hide from broken things; I want to work with their operators to improve them. I don’t want to start my own online shop. I’d be terrible at that. I just want one that works how I want it to so that I can buy things from it, and I’m happy to give a little of my time to help existing ones do that. I think if everyone did that we’d have a lovely little world where everything worked. But it needs the companies to co-operate with us, so I get cross if, when I give a company useful information for free, I’m fobbed off with a response like the one above. Worse still, there’s no real ‘reply’ option, merely a ‘tell us how we could have improved our response’ option, which is a needlessly roundabout and confusing question which I wouldn’t know how to begin answering.

So I’m replying here:

Dear Amazon, No, you did not answer my question. (And technically I didn't ask one.) Allow me to reiterate: recently your e-mail alert system has taken to sending me a promotional e-mail every 36 hours or so. That volume of e-mail is neither useful nor solicited. You are abusing the contact details I provided you with to run a spamming campaign. It sounds from your e-mail like your automated newsletter system has, for reasons best known to itself, elected to send me absurd amounts of increasingly useless e-mails. Let us be clear: this is a fault in your system and one which is costing you money. Fix it. Install a provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer. I am happy to help you do this. A good start would be to stop sending people 'deals of the week in electronics' because they buy one memory stick a decade from you. Stop hectoring me to take out a trial of Amazon Prime. I don't want Amazon Prime, because contrary to what your newsletter-droid apparently believes, I don't use Amazon nearly enough to make it worthwhile. Don't try to sell me shoes. I am never going to buy shoes from you; I have enough trouble finding ones that fit in real shops where I can try them on. Off the top of my head, perhaps you could weight each offer by how good it is and its relevance to my purchase history, and give me a slider for what 'value' threshold I'm willing to accept, or else give me a slider for how many e-mails I'm prepared to read every month and you can adjust the value threshold for me based on that. Maybe you could offer a weekly or monthly 'digest' email with anything this system filters out (obviously excluding offers which have by then expired). It is in our mutual interest for me to when you have a relevant offer on. The system you use to alert me to this is massively broken. I thought you might be interested in this information but apparently you are not. Suit yourselves, Andrew