I've been hesitant to reply since seeing this post as I realize I take solicitations and privacy a bit more seriously than others.

I have never used the software as I write my own for order tracking. I ended my company's, what I would call disastrous, professional relationship with the parent (?) company over two years prior to receiving their first solicitation, to which I didn't respond.

I have continued to receive solicitations to our general email, our order reception email, as well as my personal email. When clicking the 'why did i get this?' link in the email, the page states "You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website," which absolutely isn't true. It seems to me that they likely just used the parent company's contacts to populate their mailing list.

We've unsubscribed from each address and, after a few months, we'd start receiving solicitations again. Are they just re-dumping their contacts to the list after an update? I have submitted a complaint with MailChimp, the mailing list platform, but have heard nothing back. I found another email from earlier this month in my spam folder. I do a lot to keep that spam folder empty out of fear of my provider's algorithm getting a little too eager to throw important stuff in there, as I'm sure we all do, so that's part of what finally prompted me to post this.

I don't feel my interaction with the parent company is completely relevant, but it has influenced my take on this. Upon being contacted to provide search services, I told them that they had a few needs that we wouldn't be able to meet. Their solution was to use us anyway and flood our inboxes with emails regarding those needs. It was like asking a pizza shop if they do 30 minute delivery, being told no, and then calling them 20 minutes after you ordered and every 5 minutes after. We're going to say one thing, but do another.

So, when I hear something is against their terms of service, my thoughts are, "How would we know if our client list has been used to solicit work for themselves? I've had clients let me know they've been contacted by others. But if it were to happen as a result of this and you found out, are you ready to spend money to go to court? Would that be effective anyway? If privacy of our contact information is actually a concern, how did I get on the mailing list in the first place? Are they going to treat our information more securely than they treat their own?"

As I said above, I was hesitant to post because it seems like I draw correlations where others don't. But, if I didn't have my prior experiences, I could understand someone being able to take that risk... and possibly not even consider it a risk. I know sometimes as abstractors, we feel we have to take a risk on something because of the way the industry is going. I'm a big believer that solicitations should be opt-in and someone's behavior in one area is a good indicator of how it will be in a similar one. It seems like others have had great working relationships with this company, so that combined with me sometimes being accused of taking things too seriously, kept me from commenting. But, I do have a concerns about the privacy side of this. Between that and the repeated unsolicited emails, I'd feel a bit guilty were I to hear about anything in the future. So, I felt my experiences should be out there.