John M. Wargo

I made the mistake a few months ago of signing up for mobile alerts from Information Week. I thought I was signing up for email alerts and wasn't paying attention when they asked for my phone number.  Turns out they're SMS alerts. What IT related news could be important enough that I would need to be sent an SMS alert?  Just send me an email. it just doesn't make sense.

I went back in and tried repeatedly to find some way to cancel the alert but the company managing the site has links for subscribing to the service but absolutely nothing about how to unsubscribe. so, I waited patiently for the first alert thinking there might be a way to reply and unsubscribe. Nope, nothing. So after a couple of months of getting these SMS messages I really didn't care about I finally contacted the editors of the magazine for help (I didn't have any other recourse, there was nothing on their site that led me to believe I could get help from anyone else). The editor responded immediately, apologized for the trouble and promised to get it taken care of.  No change - I'm still getting alerts. Every time I do, I send an email to the editor and he promises to fix the problem (over and over again). Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's not trying to help me - I just think that the company they've outsourced this 'feature' to is clueless and just not being responsive.

I hope someday they finally figure this out and remove me from their mailing list. The issue I have is that SMS messages cost my employer money and I can't have that.

UPDATE: They appear to have finally removed me from the mailing list. Only time will tell.