Getting Spammed by Quest?

Is anyone else getting spammed by Quest? My attendance at Quest this past year apparently gave them permission to give (sell?) my email address to partners for their spamvertising. So now, even though I have followed their unsubscribe link, I still get spamvertising from GL Associates / Cetova.

I thought the concept of spamming people for commercial gain lay solely in the realm of pr0nographers and those selling enlargement devices. I hardly expected Quest and GL Associates to be involved in this kind of tacky venture.


Anyone else suffering from this? Anyone got any good contacts at Quest I can work with to get them to stop?

yea - it's gotten really anoying lately. One or two a day. It beats some of other junk that sneaks past the corporate spam filters. who knew there was such a market for s*x toys? I'll live with the Quest spam. At least it's not offensive.

Yes, and everytime I drop a business card in a fishbowl in the hopes that I may win something, I get 15 annoying phone calls and emails from Vendor X.

I'm in the same boat as you....

Hi Jeff,
For the record, Quest does not sell OR give out people's email addresses. If you are getting hammered once or twice a day from a vendor it isn't because of Quest, and it is illegal for any vendor to keep you on a list if you have requested to be removed.

With that said, Quest does send out an awful lot of emails because of weekly webinar announcements, monthly eNews, and daily Infocast updates. If you opted out of webinar updates and are still getting them, I would review your Quest profile information. If you are still getting the notifications and think you should not, please request tech assistance from Quest with the 'Contact Us' link at the bottom of a page.

If you tried to remove yourself from a vendor's distribution list and it does not seem to be taking, Quest can assist in getting your name removed.

I have attached a copy of Quest's privacy policy to this post. I think the most important part for you is this piece:

"Many exhibitors collect business cards and attendee data at their booths during conferences. If you offer your business card or conference badge to an exhibitor at a booth, Quest views this as voluntarily providing information to the vendor. This is how many vendors build their marketing lists. If you receive materials following a conference via email or receive a phone call, please be assured this information did NOT come from Quest, but possibly did come from the information you provided to an exhibitor during the conference."

I hope this helps get your spam down. Please clarify the source of your annoyance before placing blame.

Sue Shaw
Quest E1 Advocacy Director

Sue,

I think the issue may be related to the information we receive for Webcasts sent via InfoCasts that we do not necessarily want. Perhaps instead of actively sending this information out (because it can become quite annoying) a link can be setup where we can sign up for webcasts of interest (similar to the old PeopleSoft webcasts). I do not remember receiving this much before when a member of Quest. I also think that the User Group of E1 on Quest needs to be broken down into more functionality. I get all kinds of infocasts that I do not care to have, but cannot find a way to get out of these. Quest is a very good User Group Umbrella organization and I think it is up to us to help make it better. Eliminating unwanted Infocast email notifications can go a long way.

Gary

Gary,
Very good point. Any suggestions for improvement would be appreciated and I will feed that back to Quest.

I had a look at my own setup - www.questdirect.org for those you who don't know. It's free to be a member. Paid members get deals on conference fees so if you are thinking about the next Quest conference (Nashville, April) you might want to be a paid member.

For Infocast messages - you can control what you receive under EditProfile (on top banner)and then 'Infocast Categories'. I have signed up for Coexistence, Geographic Region/Localization, User Groups, and JD Edwards Technical Discussions. This gives me techie stuff and announcements of User Group meetings. Not too many notes.

Under 'User Group Membership' is where I believe you define what User Groups you want to hear from. I highly recommend the 'Technology' group to everyone. Under Jeannie Driscoll's leadership, this group is getting all kinds of enhancement requests into Oracle and the vendor is actually agreeing to do some of them. (shock!!) Kidding. Well, sort of. The Oracle experience with the Tech SIG has been great compared to that of PeopleSoft and even JDE.

So I believe your point is that there is no way to specify whether you would like to receive information about Vendor webinars or not. Your suggestion of a link will work for some folks, but I myself do not check websites that I should regularly so like getting the emails. If I am not interested, I just delete them. Maybe it would help to categorize the vendor webinars? And then add a part to your profile where you can specify if you want to get the notifications or not? That might make everyone happy.

Please have a look at your profile and see if you can make it work for you. I will wait to hear back from you on your thoughts on the Vendor webinar notifications and then feed that back to Quest.

Thanks very much for the input. You are exactly right - Quest needs our input to make the process work.

Sue Shaw
Quest E1 Advocacy Director
Xe Coexistent SP23J1 V5R3 all client platforms

Thank you Sue. I have my profile set up to get the same basic info that you have (tailored to my needs of course). You are right, the emails can be deleted, but I am thinking of some higher management folks that are inundated with emails anyway. If I recommend to them in our User Group to sign up for InfoCasts, they will think they are being Spammed. I really did like the way PSFT had Webinars setup where you could register for them (a listing of upcoming for the next 2-4 weeks) and then if you registered you would get a reminder. Otherwise, no notice given. Just a thought. The other "spam" that comes from having our badges at the conferences scanned is not from Quest and that is up to us to unsubscribe from those vendor emails (just the nature of conferences). But I really do think the original poster meant the Infocasts that announce webinars by various vendors. We did not have that many a couple of years ago, so I think if we can get Quest to change that it will be a good thing for us. Again, thanks for your comments. You do a great job!

Be careful what you ask for. You may have to pay for it. I'm guessing that Quest's income is not what it was in the old J.D. Edwards days. Today, we are also providing access to non-members. I don't mind because I believe we benefit from their additional numbers when we try to exercise our influence with Oracle. Nevertheless, someone has to pay the bills.

I'd be willing to pay them money to stop sending me email.



[ QUOTE ]
Be careful what you ask for. You may have to pay for it. I'm guessing that Quest's income is not what it was in the old J.D. Edwards days. Today, we are also providing access to non-members. I don't mind because I believe we benefit from their additional numbers when we try to exercise our influence with Oracle. Nevertheless, someone has to pay the bills.

[/ QUOTE ]

WHOA!!! Sounds like a "protection" service.

You mean like PBS? They have no commercials? Yeah, right!

I would surely plunge into an abyss of depression if they dropped Austin City Limits from the airwaves...

Hi all,
Ray's right - Quest is not PBS.

Quest is going to look into sending an upcoming vendor webinar schedule rather than one every week

If you are getting notifications from vendors that you don't want, it is likely from another source (like trying to win an iPod shuffle or something) - then unsubscribe from them directly.

Again, any suggestions to make Quest more useful, let us know.

Sue Shaw
Quest E1 Advocacy Director
Xe Coexistent SP23J1 V5R3 all client platforms