stuart test blog

Plaxo have made a couple of high visibility blog posts today saying that they are restricting the amount of automatic emails (a.k.a. SPAM) get sent out by users of their service. This seems like a good thing but it’s the way that they went about it that is leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.

A summary of Todd Masonis’s post today reveals the following facts:

• Plaxo have known for a long time that they were spamming people
• But it’s OK – they were only spamming people to build up their customer base
• Now that they have enough customers, they’ll stop spamming you
• They also want to be good net-citizens, that’s their other reason for stopping the spam
• If you had joined Plaxo sooner, they would have stopped spamming you
• And by the way, it wasn’t Plaxo spamming you – it was their customers.
• (Did I mention that they’re not sorry about it either?)

I’ve been using the Plaxo service for the last couple of years and have unintentionally spammed my entire address book a couple of times, and have been flamed for it too. Especially from the people that I have no reason to stay in contact with! Plaxo have always made it too easy to spam your address book – I have never seen a warning message pop up that says: “You are about to send out hundreds of emails – are you sure you want to do this?”

But moving on, they say they are going to stop the spam and that’s a good thing. Apart from that, Ive always enjoyed using their service – it works great for keeping your Outlook data synchronised between multiple computers or profiles. Let’s hope that Plaxo hasn’t caused too much of a bad name for itself among the influentials.

UPDATE: Plaxo have now made a public apology, see my post here.