For the latest example of a business causing no end of insanity and aggravation due to their inability to correctly verify and/or validate the ownership of email addresses submitted by their members, I present the game company — BioWare.
Bioware Spam
Whenever BioWare email escapes my anti-spam appliance’s blackhole, I send a fresh complaint to remove my email address from their system to the newsletter@bioware.com and privacy@bioware.com email addresses. After over ten attempts, I’ve never received a response or noticed any action.
BioWare claims to provide a “do it yourself” method of “Changing the community updates and information preference” (aka Unsubscribing) for your forged email address, but the instructions are impossible to follow:
Impossible Instructions
If you follow the instructions provided in the above image and visit accounts.bioware.com/my_account/newsletter.html, you are told that you need to be logged in to their system. The login requires you to know both the forger’s Community Name and the forger’s Password.
Ooops, BioWare needs you to be psychic.
So, not being the person who created the account with your email address, you visit BioWare’s Community Name and/or Password Recovery page at http://accounts.bioware.com/login/retrieve.html:
Hey, you said you were psychic, right?
While this exercise seems easier than Yahoo’s impossible request of trying to guess the forger’s location and birthdate to recover the account info connected to your email address, guessing the forger’s user name or password is just as unlikely.
So, you are left with the opportunity to contact BioWare at whatever email addresses you can find, to request they remove your fraudulently collected email address from their systems. And as experience has shown me time and again, BioWare ignores all email.
Again, sadly the final solution is adding email servers to my anti-spam appliance blackhole list as a result of some Internet service’s inability to verify their own users’ information.