schlitt.info - php, photography and private stuff
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:Author: 		Tobias Schlitt
:Date:			Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:34:46 +0100
:Revision: 		2
:Copyright:		CC by-nc-sa


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Fighting "personal spam"?
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:Description:
    I've been to the Dortmund post office quite often lately, mostly because
    I'm never at home when the postman wants to deliver my packages. The
    largest German post service provider "Deutsche Post AG" also owns a bank,
    the "Postbank". While they did not bother me with any of that stuff
    earlier, their advertisement for non-postal and postal products starts
    getting more and more annoying. But let me start at the beginning...

I've been to the Dortmund post office quite often lately, mostly because I'm
never at home when the postman wants to deliver my packages. The largest
German post service provider "Deutsche Post AG" also owns a bank, the
"Postbank". While they did not bother me with any of that stuff earlier, their
advertisement for non-postal and postal products starts getting more and more
annoying. But let me start at the beginning...

While queuing inside the office to get to a counter, you need to stand between
shelves that contain other stuff they sell at the post office: Stationery,
cellphones, home phones and much more. Since you usually queue between 10 and
30 minutes you get enough time to read all those nice advertisement slogans.
Right before you get to a counter, there is a large LCD screen that constantly
shows a mixture of recent news and more and more advertisement: Banking stuff,
cellphones, postal services and so on. When you finally make it to the
counter, the staffer is usually unfriendly and not the fastest one. However,
we are used to this for ages now and it's not the point of this article. When
you are finally done hand happy to hold the latest DVD from Amazon in your
hands, the staffer suddenly gets friendly: "Do you already have an account at
Postbank?". A friendly "No thanks" does not work: "A just wanted to make sure
you noticed...". "No, thank you!". "But it's about your future! Do you know
you can save...". "I am sorry, but I already have a bank account and I do not
want to change!".

After I had this situation for the 3rd time within a week now, I tend to
simply lie to those people: I now tell them I'd still work for my old employer
which also was a bank. This seems to work perfectly fine and they even reply
with "Oh, sorry for disturbing you" and let you go. However, I wonder if there
isn't any legal remedy I have against such spam? It is illegal to send me
emails about drugs I'm not interessted in, but to spam me personally about
banking services I don't want?


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