Irish Email Marketing - What Not to Do

I have just been spammed at my personal email address by the popular Irish insurance website, 123.ie. I really have to wonder what goes through the minds of those involved in the production of these mailouts risking the integrity of their entire list by including addresses they shouldn't.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never given any email address to this site. The email I received was image based so did not render in my email client properly - I had to enable the images in order to discover how to unsubscribe to mailings I never actually knowingly subscribed to. This only increased my sense of privacy violation as it is likely that these image impressions are being tracked.

In any case I followed the remove instructions trusting that they will be honoured - if not, I will be sitting on the data protection regulator to address this meaningfully. I also marked the email as spam in my Gmail which hopefully will have some negative impact on future mailouts by 123.ie.

Irish email spam is relatively rare and I for one, intend to keep it that way :)