I’m a, or was, a proud member of IEEE for the last eight years. ?The beginning of the ninth year is off to an incredibly rocky start.
In the last year I have received more junk mail on behalf of IEEE. ?Most of it was from travelers insurance. ?Some of it was life insurance nonsense… ?Nothing more than recycle bin fodder. ?Then the IEEE Spectrum magazine started to lag behind the times. ?And not just lag a little – Make: magazine was beating them to new and interesting stories by six months or more. ?At one point in time I would read Spectrum from cover to cover as soon as I got it. ?Now… They aren’t as interesting and go unread for months.
Monday evening starting around 17:00 someone sent an email to ieee-oregon@ieee-or.org and ieeeoregon@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG which set off a storm of replies, replying to everyone in the mailinglist, asking to be “removed” or “unsubscribe.”
The really?interesting?comment was from one individual who [replied to the list and] said “Sending “unsubcribe” messages to this list has no effect, beyond demonstrating thoughtlessness. ?No human operator is standing by 24×7 waiting for your unsubscribe message – it is robot software, mindlessly rebroadcasting everything you send to it.”
I was a bit shocked at this statment. ?Could there really be an engineer this oblivious? ?I guess he answered that one all on his own. ?Sending unsubscribe will unsubscribe you from mailing lists; on a mailing list that was set up correctly or run by proper software. ?I guess IEEE doesn’t have that software.
If someone had not been nice enough to post the some-what obfuscated link to remove your [illegally added] email from the IEEE Oregon chapter this nightmare of emails would probably continue.
If you have found your email address illegally added to the Oregon IEEE mailing list you can remove it here:
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