Sick and tired, but now highly amused. Another "only in France"

[YCCMB]

Although they all automatically go into my spam folder, it's been annoying me for the past 10 years that clearly when I signed up to a contract with Orange mobile they sold my contact details to some online marketing company who have been bombarding me with rubbish ever since. More annoying still, it's always seemed that I must opt out of each and every individual e-mail I receive, rather than being able to opt out on a blanket basis of the whole sorry lot.

Tonight, having a few minutes to spare, I decided to have a Google and see if there existed an organisation who may be able to help me, like the DMS in the UK.

I came across, in the results of my search, a promising heading:

"Publicites indesirables, un guide pour ne plus en......(One assumes the next word, curtailed by Google's search function, is "recevoir")

And the website is "notre planete.info"

So, click I did, and I was taken to the relevant page where I was able to read that it was, indeed, a practical guide to stopping undesirable publicity.

Sadly, I am doomed to never knowing if this information will be of help to me in my quest. Why? Well, as I waited for the page to load, it was prevented from doing so by another page from "notre planete"

It said, and I quote (without accentson the bits I haven't C&P'd, because I'm having a few problems inserting them)

Vous bloquez la publicite sur notre planete.info"

It went on.."Vous recevez cette alerte car votre navigateur Internet bloque les publicités. Malheureusement, la publicité nous est indispensable pour faire vivre ce

site et ses auteurs qui sont 100% indépendants autant moralement que

financièrement."

The irony of castigating me for blocking publicity on a page which is supposed to tell me how to block even more publicity seems to be entirely lost on Notre Planete,info.

My search continues...

[mint]

Ma pauvre Betty, you have my utmost sympathy.

The only thing I could suggest, get out of your Orange contract ASAP, get a SIM card and hunt around for mobile services sans abonnements.

Then, do not give your number other than to nearest and dearest and then....voila, problem solved!

 

[YCCMB]

Ah, sweet Sweets, I am a step or two ahead of you...you see, I abandoned my Orange contract very quickly, about nine years ago and since then I have enjoyed flitting from NRJ to Leclerc to Free...but the legacy of Orange selling my details lingers on....and on.....and on....

I do, however, let the emails in question languish in the account which I still appear to have (not that I still want or use it) from Orange UK, with whom I also parted company for both mobile and internet some 18 months ago. I only check in periodically to ensure that nothing of worth has slipped through the net...

[NormanH]

I had a look on the CNIL site, but there is nothing of much practical help.

I use a number of add-ons blockers atc

[YCCMB]

The thing is, Norman, I'm using blockers of many descriptions, I don't use my "regular" email address when I'm compelled to provide one unless I absolutely need to, and yet the real basis of my complaint is that Orange France (and I KNOW it's them: how else can I explain that all these junk emails are from French companies and in French?) have clearly made free with my email address without ever giving me the option to opt out, and now that they have unilaterally opted me IN, I can't stop this constant trickle of unsolicited e-mail by one simple "unsubscribe" action. I have to, if I wish, systematically unsubscribe from each and every individual email I receive, and as I do so, they are replaced by a whole new batch from a new series of companies. This has been going on, as I said previously, for the best part of 10 years.... This is about them asking for my e-mail address when I signed up for a phone, and then simply passing it on. No amount of using adblockers or anything else would have prevented that, as the whole transaction took place in the real world, using traditional pen-and-paper.

Now, I'm careful and scrupulous about ensuring that wherever I'm given the option (and even when I'm not), I specify that I don't want to receive spam. It is more than a little annoying that Orange - or anyone else - should be allowed to do this and get away with it, without asking my permission to do so.

[mint]

Mind you, even if you do opt out, lots of companies out there do not pay a blind bit of notice.

There are companies, Brit, US and French, with whom I have unsubscribe and still, they send me stuff.

Perhaps we need to accept that this is the digital age and that we are all connected whether we would or no.  Imagine EM Forster setting such store by "connection".  Which book of his is it where the mantra seems to be "only connect".

Deconnecting is the problem of our times, je crois [:'(]

[YCCMB]

Probably...but the irony here is that a website that purports to be able to advise me how to stop advertising will only allow me to see what they have to say about it if I ALLOW their advertising. Now if that's not totally base-about-apex, I don't know what is.

[mint]

Er...a**e over t*ts?

[Clair]

The CNIL guide is HERE (opens pdf file).

PS: Betty, I use a couple of ad-blockers too, but I got to the relevant page on notre-planete.info without any problem...

[YCCMB]

Hi Clair....Thanks for that, but, well, it doesn't work for me...even following your link, the relevant page comes up and is instantly replaced by the one I quoted from above. Obviously my adblockers and other add-ons are more robust than yours! [:)]

[YCCMB]

Hmmm...seems that to get anything done I've got to write letters and attach copies. Frankly, the volume of spam I'm getting means I probably couldn't afford the postage or even keep up with the numbers of different companies who are sending me the damn things. As certain ones give up, new ones come along to take their place!

[NormanH]

[quote user="Clair"]The CNIL guide is HERE (opens pdf file).

PS: Betty, I use a couple of ad-blockers too, but I got to the relevant page on notre-planete.info without any problem...

[/quote]

The link I quoted was to open the relevant page in the CNIL brochure....

[nomoss]

Maybe Orange have changed their policies/practices, but we have had 2 Orange mobile contracts for nearly four years, Orange Internet for nearly two years, and have not experienced your problems.

Surely you don't still use the same email address you gave Orange ten years ago? If so, it would seem a good idea to change it. If not, how could Orange be responsible for the spam you get?

Almost no spam gets past our main email server, through whom all our mail passes, and the only unwanted French email is from The Co****ion. I have "unsubscribed" many times to no effect, and now delete their emails on receipt, although I'm considering officially reporting them as spam. 

I don't check all our blocked and held emails (average about 2 or 3 per day, maximum about 6, none for the last 2 days) as to which address they were sent to, but those I have checked have been sent directly to our main server, rather than collected by them from other servers.

Spam of a particular type usually stops shortly after being reported, being replaced eventually by other themes. Last Friday we had, supposedly, one from HMRC, one from a company wanting to refund us a payment, one advising how to become fit and slender, and another advertising a football stadium. They are all quickly deleted after a quick glance at their provenance.

The only unwanted French email we have received has been from companies we have dealt with here, and this has stopped immediately we unsubscribed, apart from the outfit mentioned above.

My email service costs me $30 a year, but it provides a permanent address which I have only changed once in over 10 years, and the fact that it is with an anti spam organisation tends to prevent spammers sending to its addresses.

The only reason I changed my address was because someone on ebay, with whom I had a dispute, put my address on dozens of nasty mailing lists. I couldn't prove he did it, and was receiving hundreds of emails every week, so the simplest solution was to change the address.

The funny thing is that he has a factory making mirrors, which I can even see on Google.[:D]

 

 

[YCCMB]

[quote user="nomoss"]

Surely you don't still use the same email address you gave Orange ten years ago? If so, it would seem a good idea to change it. If not, how could Orange be responsible for the spam you get?

[/quote]

I think I've explained this before on another thread. I gave orange France my orange UK email address. I don't use it any more but I get the mail from it forwarded to my Gmail account, which in any case filters all the c**p into its spam folder. I check that once a month, before it deletes the spam all by itself, because on rare occasions something which is NOT spam does end up there. It's only then that I see that 90% of the span is forwarded from my old e-mail address and is ALL in French (massive clue as to the origin, I feel). I have never had cause to give a French organisation (other than Orange) my email address, and if I did, I would still use my old Orange UK address, because then I would have a fairly good idea of the origin.

I'm having trouble understanding why you might think that the age of my email address or the time since I gave it to Orange France might absolve them of responsibility for flogging my details on, but perhaps there's something I haven't understood?

[nomoss]

I think you understood perfectly well what I meant.

You just want a grumble and an argument. [:D]

[YCCMB]

Actually, I wanted neither and I didn't understand. But fair enough, if you don't want to explain, I'm tired, I've got a migraine and I'm packing for a holiday in the morning so it isn't up there at the top of my list of priorities. [:D]

[marmite]

We have problems like that Betty, when we got the phone installed I took up the offer of an internet account and a Orange.fr e.mail address just in case we needed to look at anything whilst in France. We are miles from the exchange so we could only get dial up.

 I entered the Orange account details into Outlook express on the computer in the UK then I started to receive e-mails all in French from various firms, it didn't take a genius to work out who supplied my Orange'fr e-mail address to these firms, as Betty knows. I have never sent any emails from that account.

 I used to just delete them, but then we went to France for a couple of months, upon returning to the UK and opening outlook express about 250 e-mails started to download. What to do.... I could stop them being downloaded from the server, but doing this I thought it may cause me problems in the future as if it looks as if the account is dormant Orange may delete my account stopping me to access the internet if I needed it.

So what happens now is all the e-mails I receive via the Orange.fr account is forwarded automatically to [email protected]

They are annoying me by selling my details so I think its fair to annoy them.

I don't think this will help Betty as it seems her problem is on her main account. No firms have my main UK email address only selected friends and family. I use Yahoo mail for any outside correspondences with their disposable e-mail addresses. It works for me.

[nomoss]

I meant the opposite of the way you read it.

I guess I should have written:

Surely you don't still use the same email address you gave Orange ten years ago? If (delete "so", insert:) "you do", it would seem a good idea to change it. If not, how could Orange be responsible for the spam you get?

Have a nice holiday[:D]

 

 

[Quillan]

In defence of Orange I have to say I have been with them (originally as wanadoo) for 12 years and I don't have these problems. I probably get about 5 a week and they go straight to my Orange junk mail folder (nothing to do with Outlook). In fact if you allow updates on your Outlook (well MS Office actually) you get a filter every month and any that get as far as your actual Outlook 'In Box' should go directly to the 'Junk' box in Outlook. I think it more likely it is somebdy else that you have contacted, possibly a long time ago, that has sold your email address on.

[nomoss]

Further to Quillan's post, I only referred to recent dealings with Orange. In fact we have had contracts with FT under their various names for many more years than I mentioned, and have never had such problems.

I tend to agree with Quillan's analysis, or that you inadvertently accepted some preferences rather than opting out when you originally subscribed, or that someone maliciously fed your email address into nasty sites, as happened to me.

 

 

[YCCMB]

Ah, the old "It's not happened to me, therefore it can't be happening to you" response. Coupled, Quillan, with the old "I'm doing it this way, therefore if you're doing it differently, more fool you" response.

I cannot any longer find nor prove it, because I didn't keep a record at the time, but at some point I followed the trail from the list provider, and am fairly confident that it came from Orange.fr. Of course, once you get into one direct marketing database, it doesn't take long to get into others. The current one is supplied to the spammers by a company called leadiance.sl, according to the statutory information on the bottom of the spam. Now, if I can find that out, please give me credit for not simply bandying the name of Orange about in vain and trust me when I say that I am 95% confident that they are at the root of this in my case. Now, if you haven't personally had this problem, excellent, I couldn't be happier for you. But it would certainly be more beneficial if, instead of casting about to endeavour to apportion blame to me, or to absolve Orange from any, you could come up with a suggestion to stop said spam.

[NormanH]

Hijacking the thread a little I use a tracker blocker (an add-on in Firefox or Chrome) called Ghostery which show very clearly which agencies are following you when you visit a particular page

There are 7 trying to track me as I type this.....

I note with a certain wry resignation that the site that seems to have the most of these is the Guardian....[:(]