Quite some years ago, I had a health insurance plan with Humana, although I gave it up because the premiums seemed entirely disproportional to the benefits. They have continued to bombard me with emails telling me how wonderful they are, with an obligatory sentence at the bottom:
If you do not want us to contact you by email, you can unsubscribe from our online Humana community.
I do not know anything about this “community” of which they speak, other than that they seem to think I want to be part of it.
Clicking on the “unsubscribe” link takes me to a page at their randomly named email service, whereupon I check the “don’t send me anything” box and click the “Submit” button:
Did you see the green text near the middle, where my email address should be? Apparently somebody misconfigured the email script to not include the actual address; the %25 gibberish seems to be encoded percent signs, so it may be one of those too-many / too-few / wrong-kind of character escapes.
Just a typo that could happen to anyone. Right?
Having once been a customer, I still have an account, but there is no way to control / shut off those messages. Not being a current customer, however, I cannot use their chat interface, which would likely not be productive. I am unwilling to wait on hold for an hour, because I know my call is not valuable to them, and their customer service rep wouldn’t be competent to solve the problem anyhow.
Fortunately, I can set up a filter to route their emails directly to trash.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
8 responses to “Humana Unsubscribe FAIL”
Can’t you use your Javascript -fu to stick your email address in there?
The URL in the clicky link is one of those encoded gizzies carrying enough bits to uniquely identify not only me, but also every electron in the universe. With no readable text, I’m at the mercy of their dubiously motivated script wranglers.
Not that I would expect a correctly coded unsubscribe link to unsubscribe me.
[heavy sigh]
call their sales line for a faster response, tell them you’re interested in re-joining their community but only if they unsubscribe your work email address which filters out their important messages and use your personal email address instead. I usually use bill@microsoft.com for such purposes but YMMV with that one
Well played, sir!
Great minds think alike… I’ve been using billg@microsoft.com for that kind of thing for over a decade.
there must be name for people like us…..
Of course there is. It’s Bill.
I guess the collective noun would be ‘wad’?