Over the last few weeks I’ve been unsubscribing from as many mailing lists as I can – I have finally got email working on my phone and was receiving about 30 marketing emails a day. Irritating.

Some companies have been fantastic, but others (dabs.com and the Dell Outlet) have ignored three requests to stop. The dabs ‘unsubscribe’ link plain doesn’t work, so requests have been sent to their assistance@ address.

I know it’s a trivial thing but it’s filling my phone with humbug on a daily basis and deleting them one by one is getting old. Is there an ombudsman or someone I can get in touch with?

Can you set up a manual filter to put them straight in a ‘junk’ folder? That’s what I do.

Buy their products?

If legitimate companies are ignoring unsub requests, I’d ring them and give them a bollocking. In my experience, it’s -very- effective.

If it’s a spammer, ‘unsubscribing’ is the worst thing you can do as it verifies your address and will increase your spam exponentially.

Other than that, change addresses or set up a mobile-only address.

Cheers for responses. The worst offenders seem to be legit retailers – big companies. Think phoning them probably is the way forward but I really begrudge paying the 0845 tarrifs to do so. I don’t doubt there’ll be a 15 minute, multiple choice, tension-headache-inducing nightmare wait to actually speak to a sub-human drone. [meldrew mode off].

Send an email telling them they’ve been reported to the Information Commissioners Office under breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 for not complying to my unsubscribing requests.

Worked for me last time.

Ah! That’s the kind of thing I was looking for, ta!

I tried and tried to stop Dell bombarding me and it took Tweeting about it for direct action to be done and for them to stop.