Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi folks.

I’m on day four of M&S spamming me with the same email 24 times a day



And it’s getting tiresome. I’d usually just block it BUT M&S are the only supplier for my boy’s school uniform (where I have two outstanding orders) so I don’t really want to block it as every year they are, frankly, a bit crap at getting the order correct.

So I asked the good peeps on Twitter, and got this reply:



So my question is, will this work? I honestly don’t see how this is somehow my fault as each of the emails has a different ‘sent at’ time, so seem to be individually sent by them, and honestly deleting my email account and apps from all my phone and laptop, etc, clearing all the cookies, etc on all those things, then reinstalling all of the various apps and accounts seems to be a BIG task, and I hate doing it. I’ll do it if I have to, but just wanted a quick check that the suggestion makes sense before I do, because it doesn’t to me.

They are surely taking the piss now

No, it won't work, Clare is obviously reading from a script. It's an issue their end by the looks - it's possible they send their mail in batches and you should be in one batch but you're in all of them.

If it helps, the "From" for order emails is "Marks and Spencer Service" so if you are able to filter incoming emails you can have it send anything "From" M&S Sparks to the bin without affecting your order emails.

I dont see any way this will make any difference at all , for now I'd stick a filter on to dump them and turn it off in a week or two when hopefully they have fixed their internal IT problems

Clare says she is passing on the advice from the IT team, so she is either lying or the IT team are telling me, via her, to just accept it.



I’ll check out what the from field is for the embroidered school uniform site, as I’ve had to order different parts of the uniform from both of the M&S school uniform sites, (because of course they don’t stock the same things in the ‘my school uniform’ site as they do in the school uniform section of the normal M&S site…) and try to set the filter up, or get Russell to as I hate email filter rules.

Just tell her in an hour that you've done it and it's still happening. They'll never know.

Her IT team is the script she's reading from.

It's also likely she's not called Clare.

That lying bastard. I knew it’d be a ‘Dave’ from IT.

I’ll do what you suggest, Jem, and tell them I’ve done that as a last measure in a couple of hours (because I’ve already told them that it is nonsense and won’t work).

They’re still coming through so whatever they did*, it didn’t work.

*I’m kidding, I know they did absolutely nothing.

I doubt the "IT Team" are even the ones sending the email. I'd bet thats out-sourced to some mailer company.

Goddarned Gavin from the mailer company pretending to be Dave in IT pretending to be Clare from the social media team. I hate that guy!

Clare, Emma and Donna are all on the case now.

Meanwhile I’ve hit 91 copies of the email and am very excited about their fantastic offers on family days out.

Ridiculous. It’s their fault so you shouldn’t have to do all that shit.

I’d report them to the Information Commissioners Office & tell them you’re going to do it as well:

https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/nui ... am-emails/

Have you tried opening each email and then deleting each email?

This would make Clare's life so much easier.

I’m not getting any of give it other emails repeatedly, it seems, so in the worse case I hope the promo ends soon.

It only bothers me as I have to keep a clean email box with everything addressed and dealt with immediately, so it’s just a lot of (tiny) anxiety spikes that I have an outstanding task. It’s not massively impactful, just my radar going off more than it usually does.

I *am* quite irked by the response. Basically blaming my email and setting me quite a big task to fix something unfixable at my end.

They might send me junk mail leaflets every hour and tell me it was my letterbox to blame and I simply had to take it off the door, stuff the remaining hole with a brick and burn down the enclosed porch. But then all the mail would just start pouring in down the chimney. Bloody Dumbledore.

It isn't unheard of for a receiving email server to get "stuck" and create copies of the same email in a loop, but I've had that happen to servers that I was responsible for literally once in nearly 21 years -- and I certainly wouldn't expect it to happen on one of the "big" name servers like Gmail -- and even when it does, you'd typically get the copies much quicker than an hour or so apart from each other.

I guess these particular IT spods just aren't any IT spods, they're M&S IT spods.

It's classic clueless IT Helpdesk tactics. Here's some busy work for you to do while we find out how to fix the issue or escalate it to someone who can fix it. Keep at them.

Like nettle stings and dock leafs

2nd and 3rd line support are the doc leaves of the tech world