Uber: a spam company. Lenovo: a spam company. Lastminute: a spam company

I've just received yet another spam from Uber.  I opted out.  Yes, I've opted out several times before.

 

 

The spam from Lenovo is more interesting.  They are very determined to piss off their customers, and their geniuses in the spam department have come up with the following wheeze: the spam is dressed up as a "rewards statement", and according to their legal theory, can now be counted as "transactional" and therefore mandatory.  Never mind that I didn't get any reward points this month, nor did I ask to enroll in their rewards scheme, nor did I consent to use of my email address for anything except specific communication about a laptop purchase I did a while back.

Note how they taunt the spam victim with "This is not a marketing or promotional email. You cannot unsubscribe as this is a transactional email".  If anything is asking for some anti-spam litigation, this is it.

Around 2013-2014 I did take legal action against a dozen or so spammers, from the John Lewis group, to some low-life spam specialist.  I got quite a few thousand pounds in settlements.  The only one that came to court was Last Minute, who repeatedly ignored demands by signed-for letter to their company's registered office address, demanding that they stop spamming me.  In each of these I informed them that if they continued to spam, they agreed to pay me double the previous per-message amount, which started off at 100 GBP.  When it came to court, Lastminute claimed they had "no record" of any of these letters, even tho I had proof of them being delivered.  The judge missed the point by taking his phone, going "here's a spam -- there, I've deleted it!".  Yeah, no.  If spam takes 10% of everyone's time, then it's taking approximately 10 million human lifetimes every single year, and spammers need to be dealt with accordingly.  Lastminute tried saying I had to use their unsubscribe mechanism, instead of demanding via letter.  The law specifically says no, they have to respect when asked, they can not say it has to be done their way, and the judge got this right.  But he only awarded 1 GBP per spam, amounting to maybe 50 in total.  They did pay.  The Lastminute lawyer, who before the hearing was courteous and shook hands, and gave some kind of legal advice to me because was required to do so (I was representing myself), nearly cried and went off without saying anything.  Maybe she was on no-win-no-fee.  The judge wished me "good luck in [my] crusade against spam".  He might have actually listened to what I was saying in the hearing, then, instead of cutting me off every time I spoke.  The following week, I heard from the clerks at Oxfordshire County Court that they had failed to deliver to the judge the hundreds of pages of evidence, on paper, that I had submitted in support of my case. This included the letters to Lastminute, proofs of their delivery, and hundreds of pages of printed spam.  So the judge never saw these, at least not before hearing the case.  So always check with the judge that your submission has been delivered.  Don't assume it has, not in England.  Court fees were high because they were based on the amount I was claiming, not the amount awarded.  In retrospect I should have claimed printing costs and travel expenses.  I also should have appealed it based on the clerks' mistake.