Subject: Frustration with unsolicited email from RealEstateWebpages.com

From: "RealEstateWebpages.com" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 21:01:12 -0500

Dear Sir/Madam: 

This email is being sent to the group address [email-masked].
Some of you may have already received this message after complaining
directly to the webmaster at RealEstateWebpages.com. I am sorry if this
is the case but I am trying to ensure that all affected parties are
notified.

It has been brought to my attention that you have become extremely
frustrated with our automated opt-in email campaign. I sincerely
apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. Our company has taken
the entire system off-line as of 7:00 pm Sunday October 29th until this
problem is corrected.

You are probably wondering why this problem occurred in the first place.
It seems that this email address ([email-masked]) was mistakenly
included in our recent email campaign to North American Realtors. This
in itself would not have normally required more than a simple
unsubscribe on your part. However, it turns out that your address is a
group list address for multiple email accounts in your organization.
 
When the first email went out, it was received by your mail server and
forwarded to a group of final addresses. When an individual in this
group unsubscribed from our list the unsubscribe program automatically
replied to all the members of the original group address that they have
been successfully unsubscribed. That meant that all individuals in the
group got another unsolicited message saying that they had successfully
unsubscribed.  We think that at this point one or more other individuals
in the group also tried to unsubscribe. The unsubscribe program was not
designed to deal with list submissions. Basically, when a user
subscribes or unsubscribes the program just throws a toggle switch on or
off. By having multiple users all unsubscribing from the same list it
kept automatically re-subscribing and then unsubscribing the same group
name. Each time this was done it sent out another group message to all
of you saying that you have now been added or deleted from our list.
This probably totally irritated some other members of the group, who
then also tried to unsubscribe from our list. This started yet another
round of email responses of subscribing/unsubscribing - and so on and so
on.

We are extremely sorry for this problem.  The mistake was made on our
part and we will not repeat it. It is very understandable that many of
you reached a high level of frustration with our system (one individual
unsubscribed over 10 times). In order to eliminate this problem and to
break this cycle we decided to take our entire email list system
off-line as of 7:00 pm Sunday October 29th 2000. Any further
unsubscribes will not create any more email responses from us.

It is unfortunate that it took us a few days to figure out what the
problem actually was. We had never experienced a problem with a group
list address before. By taking our system offline we will break the
circular cycle of subscribing and unsubscribing that has been going on
between your group of addresses and our server for the past few days.
Again, we are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused and have made
sure that your address has been removed (permanently) from our system.

Vivian Debruyn-Smith
Customer Service, RealEstateWebpages.com

P.S. If for some reason this does not solve the problem please call me
directly at 1.800.367.9814 or email me at... 

[email-masked]  (don't worry, this will not put anyone
into an automatic response system - you will be emailing my personal
address).