Stop sending me these emails. Oh. Thanks.

A few years back, I bought some miscellaneous geekery from microwarehouse. I can’t even remember what it was, but I remember it being rather reasonably priced, and turning up in one piece.

Since then, having forgotten to tick a box — or forgotten to not tick a box — I’ve been getting their occasional promotional emails. Today, I tried to unsubscribe myself from this list. I’ve had times when doing this entails logging back into a site by remembering a username / password combination which I may have used on one occasion a few years ago before I can remove myself from their list.

But today, I clicked the ubiquitous unsubscribe link from their email. The resultant page contained one button marked “Confirm”, and details of the email address which I was removing. Press the button, and that’s it! I was so happy, I used the 8 minutes they just saved me to send them a thank-you email.

In light of well-known — and perhaps less well-known — thoughts on lock-in, this experience was so very refreshing. And even though I no longer have the most up-to-date prices of Precious infiltrate my inbox, the likelihood of me using microwarehouse for future purchases has just soared. For me, a well-meaning techie might just have done more for the image of the company than any number of advertisers or brand consultants can ever have done.