The Curse of SPAM

I received an unsolicited email from the RAC a few days ago. I searched high and low for an unsubscribe - but no, there wasn't one.

There was a time when “unsubscribe” meant just that. You clicked, and the junk dried up. Now the corporates have found a new trick. They label their adverts as “service messages,” ducking under the wire of GDPR and PECR. They aren’t spam, they insist. No – they’re “important communications.” Important, that is, if you happen to care about half-price oil filters, Klarna instalments, or some other made-up urgency.

This is the great legal conjuring act. Parliament passed laws to stop inboxes being flooded. The companies went out and hired clever lawyers to rewrite the labels. Marketing becomes “service.” A hard sell becomes “advice.” Data-sharing becomes “customer care.” And because the wording ticks a box in some regulator’s checklist, the emails keep coming. Not just one or two – a daily barrage, smothering your inbox like Japanese knotweed.

The sheer volume is staggering. Banks, insurers, utilities, supermarkets – all at it. Each one claiming a “legitimate interest” in harassing you. Each one pushing the same dead-eyed sales tat under the pretence of duty. The unsubscribe link, if it exists at all, is buried in the header or hidden behind a login wall. And when you do click, it’s like Hydra – cut one head off, two more appear.

This isn’t communication, it’s pollution. Digital fly-tipping on a mass scale. Companies have turned your email into their advertising hoarding, and the law – meant to shield you – is being used as the battering ram.

And let’s not forget the hypocrisy. The same firms will go on about “protecting your privacy” in glossy brochures. They’ll bang on about sustainability while blasting out millions of unwanted emails, powered by server farms chewing through electricity. Privacy and green credentials in the morning, inbox carpet-bombing by teatime.

Spam used to be the preserve of Nigerian princes and miracle diet pills. Now it’s respectable corporations, dressed in suits, hiding behind “service notifications.” The effect is the same: wasted time, lost messages, rising irritation.

And then there’s Klarna, worming its way into the mix. Buy-now-pay-later for your car service. Split £179 into three monthly instalments, as if you were financing a yacht. Miss a payment and your credit rating takes the hit. Yet this is pushed as part of “customer care.” It’s nothing of the sort – it’s selling debt under the bonnet of a breakdown service.

It’s time to call it what it is. Not service, not duty, not advice – spam. Pure and simple. Wrapped up in corporate euphemism and shoved down your throat. And the regulators? They stand politely by while the floodgates creak open.