Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Alert: Wind “power” is a fraud - Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

I received a couple of emails sent to two different email addresses with the subject Wind “power” is a fraud from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.

I decided to check these out in case they contained malware.

On opening the emails I remembered I'd seen this type of email some time ago. I previously rang the organisation and if I recall correctly they used a third party mailing list.

If this is a political party then based on my understanding of the anti-spam Act they aren't in breach. However I do wonder if the third party mailing list organisation is in breach. I haven't provided my email details and suspect the email addresses may have been harvested in some way.

My advice to the organisation was that whilst they may not be in breach of the anti-spam act, sending unsolicited emails is generally not welcome. I asked them to remove my details from their mailing list and will do so again. I suggested to the organistion that they should put the effort into building their own opt-in email list. They should have sufficient members and contacts of members to start building a good list and it can grow from there. Using purchased mailing lists simply damages their credibility. I certainly now don't consider these emails to have any credibility at all.

Personally I don't think it was right for the government to exclude themselves and charities from the anti-spam legislation. We should have one set of rules and the government shouldn't be making rules simply to favour themselves.

I would suggest unsubscribing and then deleting these emails.

- Kelvin Eldridge

2 comments:

  1. Wind power is a fraud. It's good to see an organisation getting out this message widely. The Citizens Electoral Council has my vote. The Labor, Liberal and National parties may as well join the Greens with their renewable nonsense.

    Jack McDonald

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jack,

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

    The problem for me isn't wind power, it is that I have previously taken the time to speak to the Citizens Electoral Council and have my details removed from their mailing list. Now I've again received what I consider to be spam from them.

    The government has left the anti-spam legislation open so political parties can spam us. To me spam is spam. The rules should be put into place for all of us to follow, not left open so they can act differently from the rest of us.

    When a group does not respect those who they aim to serve, then it makes me question them and their message.

    As I said to the Citizens Electoral Council, they could easily create their own mailing list by getting people to opt in.

    The end to me does not justify the means.

    Kelvin Eldridge

    ReplyDelete