Should I Register On Dmachoice

Since 1971, the Direct Marketing Clan (DMA) has offered a service chosen the Post Preference Service (MPS).  The declared purpose of the MPS is to allow consumers to register which kinds of direct marketing post they desire, or to opt out completely.  DMA members are then supposed to scrub their mailing lists against the MPS lists and not ship mailings to people who don't want them.

Why would an association whose members make their money from direct mailings offering a service to let people to opt out?  While they cloak their motives in all kinds of fancy linguistic communication well-nigh consumer choice, protecting the environment by reducing unwanted mailings, etc., the real reason why is to offering voluntary cocky-regulation to dissuade the states and federal government from regulating the industry.  And information technology works — the mail direct marketing industry is essentially unregulated.

Nonetheless, as noted, the DMA's members don't actually desire consumers to opt out of their mailings, so they've always made it difficult and abrasive to sign up for the MPS.  For example:

1. Enrolment expires subsequently three years.
2. There is no notification from the DMA when your enrolment is going to expire.
3. Obviously, the DMA and its members are intimately familiar with utilizing the U.South. Postal Service'south alter-of-address lists to update their mailing lists when people move.  They could easily use the same lists to update the MPS, thus obviating the need for entries on the list to expire at all, but they don't do this.
4. Long later on everybody nether the sun was doing things like this on-line, the DMA continued to require people to ship in forms by U.S. Mail service to enroll in the MPS.
5. When they did finally get-go letting people enroll on-line, they charged a fee, and the enrolment Web site was awful. (I'm not sure, but I call up there was a fourth dimension during which they were even charging a fee for enrolments sent in via the U.South. Post.)
6. They've finally started letting people enroll on-line for costless, merely the (new) Web site is merely as awful and doesn't work, and they don't care, which is what has prompted me to write this blog entry.

Last year, I enrolled everyone in my family in the MPS using the previous version of their Web site.  Yesterday, I tried to use the Spider web site (http://dmachoice.org/) to confirm the status of our enrolment, and I discovered that they've redesigned the site, and my quondam login credentials no longer work.  Clever!

I therefore ready out to annals with the new site and enroll us in the MPS again, simply to make certain nosotros were enrolled.  They only permit up to five names to be associated with a single account on the Spider web site, so to register all 7 members of our family, I have to create ii accounts on the Spider web site.  Unfortunately, the Web site uses your email accost as your username, and so if you merely take one email address, you can't register twice on the Web site and therefore y'all can't register your entire family if it has more than v people in it.  Bright!

Fortunately, my mail service server supports extended addresses, i.eastward., messages sent to jik+foo@kamens.brookline.ma.us, jik+bar@kamens.brookline.ma.u.s.a., etc., will all exist delivered into my "jik" mailbox.  Notation that "+" is a perfectly legitimate graphic symbol to include in an electronic mail address.  Unfortunately, the DMA Web site does not accept email addresses with "+" in them.  Amazing!

Fortunately, I administer my ain mail server, so I was able to create a new address for myself "jik-dma@…" (note "-" instead of "+"), register on the site using that email address, and employ the newly created account to register five of the seven members of my family.

I then attempted to echo the procedure, this fourth dimension with some other newly created e-mail address, "jik-dma2@…".  Alas, it didn't work.  I filled out the registration screen completely and clicked the "Submit" button, but instead of being shown a confirmation screen and receiving an business relationship activation email bulletin, I was shown a blank screen (except for the card bar) and no activation email was sent.  Excellent!

I tried clearing my cache and cookies and registering again; that didn't work.  I tried with two other computers, two other browser versions and ii other Internet connections; none of them worked.  Wonderful!

I sent a request for assist through their Web site.  A day afterward, they responded with, basically, "Yeah, sometimes the Web site doesn't work.  Too bad!  You'll just have to impress out the class and annals via U.S. Postal service."

Isn't that simply then precious?

Source: https://blog.kamens.us/2009/09/23/dmas-mail-preference-service-once-a-fraud-always-a-fraud/comment-page-1/

Posted by: meagherknerve1952.blogspot.com

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