I see the month and day on those emails, but not the year. I assume they must be from 1999--the last time Kenneth Cole was cool.

Well aren't you splendidly avant-garde.

This is why I always use Sneakemail.

It's also why I have a warm fuzzy feeling for Amazon that I don't for any other web retailer. They are one of the few retailers I trust with my real e-mail address, and they have never, ever spammed me.

But grouse, that's opt-in email Firas is getting, not spam. Firas could opt-out of all the emails.

I've never had a problem with any of the companies I do business with spamming me. If I opt-in I'll get their little sales pitches. When I opt-out, they stop.

Firas' point is some retailers haven't figured out the right frequency to send out email sales pitches. There's a fine line in sending out stuff to your customer bases and harassing them. Back in the day, we'd do tests on parts of our customer lists with direct mail catalogs that would test frequency and measure it against response rate. Kenneth Cole should do something like that as well. I would imagine that response rate will actually go up if they sent out fewer emails. And also opt-out requests would go down because people aren't being constantly bombarded with emails. Ideally, a customer can be given a choice -- send me everything all the time or send me a weekly update, or send me a once-a-year sale email only.

Yeah, I want to know about new collections and seasonal discounts and stuff like that, not be told about every single offer--especially not about free shipping from the website, coz for me they're a brick-and-mortar experience and I like it that way.

(I was also being a bit facetious about the walmart comparison because I understand that a clothing label can't be cutting retail prices--it'll cheapen their brand, especially since mid-range labels like KC are neither upscale nor common-man so they're weirdly positioned anyway.)

As much as I love ebags, they sure do like to send me a lot of sales updates.

I give each retailer an email address unique to them (e.g. shoppingatamazon@myexampledomain.com) and thus far only one sold me out (800.com) in the dozen years I've been doing so. I'm promiscuous about buying online so I'm actually pretty surprised it has only happened once.

All the marketing industry newsletters I've been seeing lately have been complaining about the same thing -- with the recession, marketing budgets have been slashed, but email is cheap, so suddenly all the marketing attention is going to email which means that a lot of companies are sending out waaaaaay too many emails.

Besides the low cost, in my experience, it seems like companies also assume that customers love to hear every little thing the company wants to tell them about, and if you didn't you would unsubscribe.

What I really hate is when you check (or uncheck) all the boxes indicating that you don't want to subscribe to any of a business's four spam lists, and then later they add a fifth one and set everyone to be on it by default.