I followed W.C. Fields’s advice to his niece in the clip above just now before sending the email quoted below to customer service at a site. There’s a new trend of harassing people via email to buy items they’ve looked at in the last twenty-four hours, no doubt the product of some fevered MBA’s gin-soaked nightmares. To date, I’ve had three sites start doing this over the last several months. One of them is eBay, but I believe I found their account setting to shut these off. The site I wrote to has no such setting; in fact, I opted out of all emails from them many moons ago and verified that’s still set.

Can you tell me how to opt out of the emails haranguing me to buy items that I viewed on your site within the last 24 hours? These automated emails started just a few months ago and occur even when I’m not logged in, thanks to cookies I allow you to create on my system because I’m a registered user.

I do not wish to receive emails simply because I looked at an item, because they’re intrusive and, frankly, annoying to such a high degree that I can only compare them to a car salesman following me out of his lot and knocking on my door several hours later to ask why I didn’t buy anything. If they’re not curtailed I’ll be compelled to visit any competitor’s site rather than yours when I want to look at something.

I see no account setting that allows me to stop these emails from being auto-generated. Can you help? Thank you for your assistance in resolving this matter.

Had I not counted to ten before writing the above, I feel certain I would have included the phrase chuckleheaded Goddamned emails. A cooler head has prevailed, but I retain the satisfaction of having typed that anyway.