I guess it depends on your definition of spam. I would consider any non-personal and commercial email as spam. So yes, my inbox is regularly full of the stuff, despite Gmail’s excellent filters (which remove a huge number more). Just at the top of my inbox is stuff from Uber, hotel chains, Microsoft. All non solicited marketing crap. Same as the JJP email.
Is easy to excuse it because ‘hey it’s pinball!’, but the most disappointing realisation was that it came via a domain I thought I could trust.
Like I say, I appreciate Josh’s honesty on the issue, and his attempts to remedy it. But unfortunately it really is shutting the door after the horse has bolted now. The correct way to allow email distribution to ifpa registrants would have been via email from the ifpa. By handing out those email addresses to scores of third parties, and without any policy on what the third parties can do with that info, it’s already to late…
HOW DARE YOU SHARE MY EMAIL WITH A RELATED COMPANY THAT I’M INTERESTED IN JOSH. ONE EMAIL A DECADE IS FAR TOO MUCH FOR THE FREE SERVICES YOU PROVIDE. SHAME.
Eric - I’ve updated your email address that is on file with us. Please note that this will be the email address used to contact you regarding IFPA things like SCS qualifying and IFPA WC qualifying going forward.
Looking back at my records, out of the 23 Premier level sponsors, the email list has been sent to 4 of them. PAPA only requests the email addresses from Circuit events so they can send out their surveys, which we do share. The other 18 have not requested it at all.
I’ve updated the player profile update page with the following verbiage:
"Players that choose to update their player profile grant IFPA the right to share their email address with select IFPA sponsors. The IFPA requires that we have your email address on file to be eligible to compete in the IFPA World Championship and the various IFPA Championship Series that are hosted.
If you want your email address removed from your profile please email us at ifpapinball@gmail.com to make that request. Please note that removing your email address from your profile will result in not being eligible for IFPA Championship events."
Hopefully that makes it more clear going forward that updating your player profile with us is the “opt-in” feature of our website. Many of the players in our database (roughly 90%) don’t update their player profile at all.
For those that want to opt-out just shoot an email to ifpapinball@gmail.com and remove your email address from the database.
Like Joe mentioned and Eric has done, feel free to create a unique email address specifically for IFPA use. At this time we would like to continue to keep the site a ‘free’ site for all players.
This is a great start, thanks (both for this update, and all the work you put into IFPA and pinball in general). Any chance you’d be open to take it a bit further and start a formal privacy policy doc outlining how the IFPA handles player information? There are several free/cheap templates/generators available.
To chime in here - I have unsubscribed from JJP emails four times now, and emailed Jen personally about it multiple times.
Every time they get a new IFPA email dump, I go back on the list and start getting emails again. I have no idea what the intervals are, but it is very apparent that the “Unsubscribe” option or emailing them directly does nothing as they’re not blacklisting individuals that unsubscribe, it’s pretty annoying.
Edit- I’m wrong here, it’s only been two marketing emails since 2015. I unsubscribed last time via link and may have been auto-re-subscribed by emailing them directly. Monday morning pre-coffee fail.
Well, looks like I’m a big liar about the four emails in any case, I didn’t check the dates on the exchanges with JJP and it’s only been two marketing emails from them with back-and-forth with them after that. I’ve only used the unsubscribe link twice now.
I totally agree that one email per year is nothing at all, but this still gets under my skin.
Just a suggestion: a sentence at the top of the email to the effect of “You’re getting this email because of JJP’s partnership with IFPA” would go a long way — then there’s no need to puzzle how the heck they got my email address. That’s obviously not something IFPA can enforce, but it could be included in the guidelines when a partner is given the email list.
I disagree. As I said earlier, the better approach would be that if a sponsor wants to send an email to the ifpa email list, that email should come from the ifpa directly. Josh could send ‘a message from our sponsors…’ style email.
That way the email addresses and personal details are not shared with third parties, and it reduces the risk of email addresses then leaking out to fourth or fifth parties, either through lax security or resale of the mail list.
It would also mean that if I did then see someone else (other than the ifpa) emailing me at that unique email address, I can alert Josh that the email addresses have been leaked or stolen
The ‘.’ trick is a bit more provider specific than the ‘+’ trick. Gmail will do it, but there is no standard practice for handling a ‘.’ in the local part the way ‘+’ has been standardized.
