Man of La Mancha indeed

Further annoyance from Borders, although they want to deny that they have anything to do with it...

A while back, one of the email I received from Borders regarding my "Rewards" card was an offer to sign up for something called "Borders Rewards Perks." Upon review of this program, which is just a way for them to send lots of unwanted commercial email, I chose NOT to sign up for this.

On August 3, I got an email from Perks, the first of several. It was an ad for restaurant.com, tigerdirect.com, shoes.com, etc etc etc. I knew I hadn't suddenly decided that I wanted such crap, but just to make sure, I clicked on the "unsubscribe" link in the email. I got a not so helpful error screen that said "exception in bootstrap". I tried the "Contact Us" link and got the same error. So I clicked reply, and sent an message directly to cs@bordersrewardsperks.com telling them that a) their links were broken and b) that I didn't ever sign up, so stop spamming me.

I got no reply. I did get another spammy email, and this time contacted Borders Customer Care. The reply didn't indicate that I'd actually been opted out from the unwanted Perks membership, but told me to contact cs@bordersrewardsperks.com -- the same email to which I'd previously replied and gotten no answer.

Then on August 12, I got yet another slice o' spam, this time they had the balls to start out "Based on your reminders, we want to let you know about these special
Food & Wine offers currently available at Borders Rewards Perks:" Ummm, I never signed up, never requested ANYthing, so how did I suddenly have "reminders"? I hit reply again, copied Borders Customer Care and said once again that they had to stop.

I did do one thing wrong - the spam was hitting my netscape.net address, which shares an inbox and email client with my aim.com address. And AOL has so "helpfully" decided that every time I hit reply, they'll put my aim.com address into the From field. Thus Borders wrote and said they couldn't find that address in their records. I wrote back taking the blame and indicating which address was the subject of my problems.

The next incoming from Borders was completely strange - "You will need to directly contact the merchant regarding this issue." Then it went on about who does or does not endorse any offers, blah blah blah, and of course gave me the useless cs@... email again.

My reply: "I'm not contacting anybody else. Read the whole message and stop copying and pasting responses. YOU set me up with this unwanted Perks crap, YOU can make it stop."

I could go on. The back and forth certainly hasn't stopped. But the emails that started hitting my inbox today are priceless. They state "Thank you for your email regarding Borders Rewards Perks. Unfortunately, your request has reached an email box that does not accept incoming mail. "

Yes, I have reached an unreachable mailbox. Robert Goulet ain't got nothing on me!

I'm still getting the runaround from both Borders and their Perks spammers. But now I know I have to keep trying, when my arms are to weary.