Boy am I glad I don’t have one of these phones! Talk about breaking rules! Magilla Marketing’s daily email showcased this incredible mess of an opt-out system for Tracfone today, and this article at directmag.com demonstrates what can happen when email marketers don’t follow the rules. In this case, tracfone requires you to input your phone’s serial number in order to opt out, and that serial number is located inside the phone, under the battery. Or possibly somewhere else, so look around. Aside from being incredibly frustrating, what tracfone is doing is illegal. What’s worse is that you get subscribed to tracfone’s email list simply by adding minutes to your phone and entering your email address. No warning, no alert, nothing. And apparently they send out 3-4 emails a week.

Need further confirmation? Review the rules for CAN-SPAM that were revised July 2008 here. Specifically:

“The rules say that the opt-out process can’t require any fees or the input of a password, login, or other information that would somehow hinder unsubscribing. The opt-out process must require no more than the recipient’s email address. (You can’t run people through multiple steps to verify their identity.) In addition, the opt-out procedures must either be a single email reply or a visit to a single web page (i.e., you can’t require people to run through promotional pages or hinder them in any way on their way to unsubscribing.)”

BOOOOO tracfone! Get with the program.