I’m not an expert on many topics, but I have learned a few things from personal experience. And the chief pearl of wisdom that I can pass on to the next generation is this: never give Best Buy your e-mail address.

I get dozens of spam e-mails every day, and I am constantly unsubscribing from lists I never joined. It’s just one of the hazards of being a tech journalist.

But while I’ve accepted that my work inbox is going to be filled with junk, I go to great lengths to keep my private e-mail pristine. I use a personal domain instead of an emailprovider.com address, and the spammers haven’t found it. Even my junk folder is empty. It’s glorious.

Or at least it was, until I made the mistake of getting something at Best Buy. For a full four weeks, I received one or two e-mails a day from the ubiquitous retail store with subject lines like “4-HOUR SALE: Starts now,” “You’d be crazy to pass on this,” “Amazing deals end soon,” and “Jon, save 15% on ink and toner.”





I unsubscribed. I complained on Twitter. I complained directly to Best Buy.

Best Buy employees told me that the e-mails would stop, but after two weeks, the e-mails were still coming. So I waited for a full month... and they just kept arriving.

I never pulled the “I’m a journalist” card during that month. It's unethical, except in those rare cases when I decide to write about a personal experience, and I like to see how companies treat customers when they have no reason to expect a public backlash. Most customers can’t go straight to Best Buy’s public relations squad and expect an immediate resolution from the company department whose primary responsibility is avoiding bad publicity.

But after a month, I finally decided to write a story about this ridiculous odyssey and contacted Best Buy PR to find out what's wrong with the company's e-mail system. Only then did the problem get solved.

I also reported Best Buy to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for violations of the CAN-SPAM Act. Violators of the anti-spam law—which requires companies to honor opt-out requests within 10 business days—can be punished by fines of up to $16,000 per e-mail. You might say I’m going easy on Best Buy by writing this article instead of filing a lawsuit, but it turns out that private citizens have no standing to file CAN-SPAM suits on their own. If the FTC gets enough complaints, it may decide to sue on behalf of consumers.

The FTC has gone after many companies that violated the anti-spam law. Separately, Best Buy last year was forced into a $4.55 million settlement in a class action suit that alleged the company violated laws against robocalling.

That robocall case aside, there are far worse spammers in the world than Best Buy. If my inability to unsubscribe was really an "isolated incident," as Best Buy eventually told me, the FTC will of course have more important cases to pursue. But it's nonetheless disturbing that such a huge electronics retailer—the first stop for many computer shoppers—would make it so difficult to opt out of receiving its incessant e-mails.

This is a giant company that deals in technology, and it seems to be incapable of creating a customer support system that can process a simple unsubscribe request. Even when Best Buy's systems are working properly, the company only promises to process the requests within the maximum allowable 10 business days. Best Buy PR ultimately blamed the problem on a contractor, but its internal IT team was able to fix the issue immediately—after PR stepped in.

Canceling your Best Buy account is also needlessly difficult. As I'll explain later, I asked Best Buy to nuke my account about a month ago, and the company still hasn't fulfilled my request.

I could have just blocked all the e-mails from the beginning and been done with it. Nothing horrible happened to me, but I became fascinated by how poor this company's customer service experience is. After dealing with online businesses like Amazon, which goes out of its way to make customers happy, this was like watching an easily preventable car crash unfold in slow motion.

Best Buy and me

I bought a refrigerator at Best Buy in late March 2015; the purchase was big enough to give me a gift card that I later cashed in for two used video games (both of which were broken). To the best of my knowledge, I never opted in to receiving Best Buy marketing messages, and I've shopped at Best Buy on occasion for years, so I don't know what triggered the sudden onrush of spam. They had my e-mail address for years by virtue of my Best Buy Rewards account but had hardly ever spammed it before.

The first e-mail appeared on April 27—and I immediately clicked the unsubscribe link. I got Best Buy survey requests on May 22 and May 23 and clicked unsubscribe again each time. But on May 27 the month-long spam deluge began in earnest.

The e-mails were coming to a secondary address I have with outlook.com, which forwards to my primary Office 365 address. I created a filter that prevented them from going to my primary address shortly after they started. But since I developed a strange fascination with Best Buy’s failure to process my numerous unsubscribe requests, I let them continue going to outlook.com.

Nearly every day from May 27 until June 25 I got at least one—and often two—Best Buy spam e-mails, one in the morning and one at night. For some reason I received no Best Buy e-mail on June 12 and June 22, but those were the only exceptions. Best Buy made up for those days off by sending me four spam messages on June 17.