Today I got an unsolicited Email from Vanity Fair, who I have no relationship with, and I've never visited their site. But I noticed the email came from Conde Nast, which also owns Epicurious, which I have been fighting with for 3 over months, the whole time being mercilessly spammed by them. It's pretty easy to make the connection that Epicurious shared my email address with their sister company, so they can join in the spam fun. What's funny is that Epicurious gave them my email address after my fight began with them.

The tag line is ... ironic.

I notice that the return address emails are different between the two companies;

Vanity Fair: [email protected]
Epicurious: [email protected]

So it looks like Vanity Fair uses a third party email service provider, where Epicurious is sending spam from their own domain. Third party ESPs are usually a little more strict about the behavior of their clients, so I think there's a fair chance that Vanity Fair will honor the unsubscribe request--we'll see. I just noticed that email from Vanity Fair seems to really be coming from Epicurious.



Wait, maybe not. Is this email from Vanity Fair, or is it from Epicurious? It seems a little suspicious. Thank you, Conde Nast for sending me spam from Vanity Fair on behalf of Epicurious!


I got an austere screen when I clicked on the button.
Wait, which company did I unsubscribe from? This was a Vanity Fair email. Also note that that 10 days is the maximum allowed under the CAN-SPAM act. And from building back-end corporate computer systems for the last 25 years, the time it takes for a large system to process something like this is measured in milliseconds--thousandths of a second. So, it's kind of a dick move to spam you the full 10 days after you tell them to stop. Some systems will do a big batch processing every night, so maybe one day could be believable. But the full 10 days, yeah, that's dickish.

Here are the email headers from the above email. I know Conde Nast must be feeling a little heat, because these articles are starting to get some traction, and I'm receiving email from readers angry about Epicurious. We'll see if Vanity Fair gets my ire.

Update 1/24/2016: looks like the unsubscribe took. Now if I could just unsubscribe from their sister company, that would be a real victory.