Reader Asks, "Is It Impossible To Unsubscribe From Classmates.com?"
Yes.
Okay, we're being a little dramatic there, but Classmates.com is part of the cesspool of the Internet, a faux-legit site that uses any shady tactic it can to acquire and keep members, regardless of any genuine interest they may have in the service. We don't know if you can truly successfully unsubscribe from their junk emails because we're not sure they'd ever honor such a request, but here are two other options.
1. Cancel your membership completely.
Recommended. This PC Mag article says you'll have to call them, go through a quick menu tree, and then you'll get a live operator.
That still may not remove you entirely from their system, so your other option is to
2. Set up a filter so that you never see another email from Classmates.com again.
Also recommended. Of course, you can set up a filter in most email accounts so that any communication from the classmates.com domain can be caught and removed before you ever have to see it. (Make sure you check out the email addresses on some recent messages from them to verify the domain name they're using.) We also suggest changing your email address in your account settings at Classmates.com before you cancel the account, so that you can create a more robust filter that will catch anything they send regardless of which domain they use.
(Thanks to Amanda!)
(Illustration: Lentini)
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Comments:
I had to change all my info to the letter A.
And dang it, this service was free when i signed up!
I am only surprised that people actually pay to use the full features of that site. Let's be honest - more modern sites like Facebook (which is free) make the Classmates website all but worthless.
How are they even staying in business? I would have expected them to be bankrupt long ago.
You can set up email rules to not only send the email directly to your spam filter - you could also set up automatic forwarding to send back to classmates.
Just today I got the "someone is trying to find you" email from classmates, that I believe was previously the subject of a class action lawsuit.
Classmates emails are the free AOL trial disk of the new millenium.
It is possible to cancel an account on Classmates because I've done it before. The secret is that you need to login and remove all your schools, work locations, etc on your account. Once you have nothing left on your account, the website will ask if you want to cancel your account.
change the email field in your account to classmates.com's own 'questions' email so everytime they try to spam you, they really spam themselves.
@Costner:
How are they even staying in business?
Most likely by selling your email address (and any other related demographic information) to list brokers.
Since I canceled 4 years ago, have not gotten one piece of spam from them.
Of course, throwing the spam they sent me to SpamCop for them to parse and then file complaints made them decide to be honest.
I was able to minimize my exposure to Classmates.com by registering with a seldom used anonymous email account and using the name of an adult film star.
I just like the thought of graduates of Palo Verde High, class of '89 scratching their heads wondering, "Who the hell was Randy Spears?"
Rather than using the "gmail trick" to give them a valid address that you can then filter so that you never see their mail again, why not eliminate the middleman and give them an address like sdkfjhsdkfjh@kasdjfhskdj.net?
There's a way to cancel online as I did it yesterday (probably due to the same e-mail that caused this user to ask the question). I don't remember the exact path, since I cancelled my account. :) But, it involved searching their help/faq support site after logging in with my account information. It was fairly easy and didn't involve any phone calls. No one will be able to find me on classmates.com now, but, isn't that what Facebook does better and less annoyingly now?
I had a similar problem with Ancestry.com quite a while back. (Are they related?) My ISP went out of business so my email changed and their domain is now just parked. I am probably still getting email at that address from them.
Life Spam
Classmates.com just put up a huge ground level sign outside their new office building in Seattle. The only way to get out of our neighborhood and into the city is to drive by that big lit up sign.
What setting do I change to stop this kind of spam?
But 400 new classmates signed my guest book and I only need to become a platinum member to see all their obscene remarks.
At least for free users like myself, this article seems like crappy cable news hype. I logged in, followed the link from the PCMag article http://www.classmates.com/cmo/user/remove and voila ( so I hope!)
My local newspaper (owned by McClatchy) has Classmates.com popup windows on their website. If I click the mouse pointer anywhere on the screen, such as to open a specific news story, I get a Classmates.com popup. My popup blocker works on virtually every other popup on the internets, but not the ones from the newspaper.
I never signed up for Classmates, but they have my email address and place and year of graduation, and they spam me about once a month. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that many schemes used to defeat identity theft online include questions about high school or mascot...and that's apparently been captured by Classmates, perhaps even by one of their employees who was hoping to pad the site. I don't like that one little bit.
Aren't there only like 5 actual users of Classmates.com? Every time I see a profile on there I just think of someone who is woefully behind on today's social networking breakthroughs.
The sad thing is, what could have been. They really could have been facebook (they beat them to market by many years, after all) and sold out for billions. instead they used the nickel and dime approach and will go broke eventually.
@SkokieGuy: i miss the free AOL trial disks - i used to stick them up on my doors and walls to keep my cat entertained with shiny reflections all day while i was at work. free cat toys!
I'm just dissappointed that after almost 20 years only 29 people have searched for me... and I think 13 of those were me trying to figure out if I would show up.
i cancelled [free membership anyway] after classmates.com gave out my email address as part of a pamphlet at my high school reunion [i didn't attend] and people i had been trying to avoid started emailing me.
i had no trouble cancelling my account and haven't heard from them since.
by the way, i searched their site and did not find any information about me allowing them to print out my email [along with who knows how many others] and hand it out at a social event - so if anyone knows if it's ever been part of the EULA or something [wasn't when i double checked it a few months ago] - i need to know.
otherwise i'm going to need to have a lawyer contact them about my high school stalker finding me again [that is NOT a joke. it had been 5 years and all of a sudden he's emailing me at the email address they gave out and he never had my email before]
I once made the mistake of actually paying to sign up for an account with Classmates. I found that I couldn't actually talk to anyone on there without paying and the people I had found didn't have Facebook or Myspace accounts. So I went for the basic deal, figuring that they would charge on a monthly basis. Next day my account is missing 150.00. Turns out they charge you the full year's fees in one shot. I honestly didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the agreement terms. I ended up spending an hour on the phone with a rep canceling my account and getting a full refund.
But for those wondering how they stay in business, there you go. They charge you the entire year's fees in one shot.
Maybe this has changed, but the few times I even looked at classmates.com there didn't seem to be any way to verify anything. Is there any way to verify someone was actually in a class? Are there class moderators or something?
I signed up with different classes and different names and they stayed there a long time (haven't checked recently). I usually make up an ethnically/culturally/geographically mixed name that would never be real, like "Esteban VonWong" or "Chang McHeinkel".
I got sucked in when I got email that "10 people have signed your guestbook". I found a free trial and when I got logged in to view the guestbook, 6 of them were the same person. I knew the name but we never had a relationship, no reason for that person to view me once, much less 6 times. So that's the first red flag. And then why does that count for 6 views? Second red flag. I was able to successfully cancel, although they don't make it easy to find the link.
I succesfully deleted my account a couple of month's ago and haven't heard from them since! The link to cancel was buried deep, but it worked.
their the worst
@catastrophegirl - manic first time home buyer: Wow, that is horrible and sounds incredibly illegal. I'm curious how they can do something like that.. Especially if you didn't even attend.
Sue the pants off of them. (Maybe that would finally bankrupt them and we can stop getting spam and junk emails?) It looks like the liability (for lack of a better word) on this and what could happen is insane, imo. In the meantime, block that guy. I would say change your email address, but you shouldn't have to considering they're the ones that f-ed up royally.
@Jessica Haas: from what people told me, the pamphlet they handed out was info about people who didn't attend. and advertising, of course. so pretty much everyone they had info on that didn't attend - was listed in there.
@Canino: You never know - I saw a name on the program at my college graduation that belonged to a woman with four names - first name Winona, second name something Japanese, third name something Germanic, and the last one looked to be British English.
@catastrophegirl - manic first time home buyer: And there was no opt-out? Or did they even tell you they were doing that?
This makes me want to punch something.
She married HIM...?!
And they have SEVEN kids??!
A friend got incessant spam from them. He found an admin email, and send them a message saying that the next time he got an email from them, he was going to personally go and file a small claims action against them for harassment, pay PRNewswire to publicize the lawsuit, and bascially make as much noise as possible.
Magically, his spam stopped immediately.
@SkokieGuy: Coincidentally, my old AOL e-mail address is the only one I've had that was a classmates.com spam magnet.
@Jessica Haas: i found out a couple of weeks after the reunion when people started emailing me and i asked them how they got my email address.
Sadly, the only way to get them to stop sending me emails. I sent them an email from another account and told them that Sarah Schwartz had passed away. I know, it's remarkably sad that I had to do it that way, but it was the only thing that worked. And seriously, no one from my high school was looking for me anyway.
Back when I was trying to get rid of my Classmates account, I simply went to the part of the profile that determined my age, and changed it so that I was under the age of 13. Thanks to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, my account quickly devoured itself and all contact with the company ceased.
I got suckered into paying for a membership there once years ago, pre-facebook.
I canceled the membership, and for years, it went away. Then suddenly a couple of years ago, it came back. They emailed me to let me know they'd charged my CC for a year of their top tier service, since I decided to reactivate.
Only problem? I didn't decide to reactivate. I researched to be sure they hadn't charged me for years, found this to be true, and put in a call to their offices to find out how a dormant, previously canceled account could be re-up'd without my authorization. They couldn't explain, claiming I must have asked. They agreed to cancel and remove the zombie account from hell from their systems, but refused to refund any money, claiming "policy".
I filed an incident with the BBB in their area, which remarkably, resulted in a full refund, though they admitted no fault, claimed I did everything short of kidnapping kittens and throwing them in a toaster, etc.
Thanks for bringing this up. I got a deal on Gold Membership a couple years ago, but it expires in a couple months and this topic reminded me to cancel it. If you have a Gold membership, it looks like you have to send a message to their Membership Retention Department first. Here's the message I sent:
"Please cancel my Gold account immediately. I know I still have 3 months left, but I want it canceled now. Please do not try to contact me to get me to change my mind. If you do try to contact me to try to change my mind, that will just provide proof of why I'm canceling. Classmates.com is overpriced when compared to other services that provide a better service and I do not approve of your marketing methods. You had the opportunity several years ago to take the high road and offer a great service at a reasonable price. But instead you decided to use every trick in the book to get people to sign up for your overpriced service. Shame on you and I look forward to seeing Classmates.com in the dead pool."
Yes. That is the problem for some users recently. I wished they use that free way. It mind gain them more users.
The only way to stop receiving all email is to remove your account, entirely. I received this email from Classmates, after contacting their PR person (the only real way to get anything handled when customer service won't help). Ignore the first part -- opting out doesn't work. They don't honor opt outs.
Thank you for contacting Classmates. I can understand your frustration and will do my best to address your concerns.
If you'd like to limit the amount of email you're receiving from Classmates.com, you can easily unsubscribe from our optional email subscriptions by visiting the following link:
[secure.classmates.com]
You can also access this page directly on the site by going to your Account, located at the top or bottom of any Classmates page, and updating your preferences under Email Subscriptions.
The only way to stop getting emails completely, is to cancel your membership with Classmates.
If you opt to cancel your free membership, simply click the link below and follow the instructions provided:
If you have any difficulty accessing the link, you can also cancel by following these steps:
At the top or bottom of any Classmates page, click Help.
Under Frequently Asked Questions, click question 10. (How do I cancel my membership?)
Follow the steps provided under Free Members to cancel your free membership.
I did the latter and changed my email address in my account settings to a gmail one with extra .'s in the address then set up a specific filter for anything coming to that address to immediately delete.