Thread: Continuent apology to PostgreSQL Community members

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Eero Teerikorpi
<eero.teerikorpi@continuent.com> wrote:
> My sincere, personal apology us sending you and other PostgreSQL community
> members something that you may find unwanted and/or offending: a MySQL
> specific webinar invitation. Clearly we should not approach anyone in the
> PostgreSQL community with MySQL related news or messages and honor the fact
> that you may have earlier opt-out from all Continuent communication.

I don't think there's anything wrong with sending MySQL webinar
invitation to PostgreSQL users.  People may not be interested, but
that doesn't make it spam.  I do think there's something wrong with
signing people up for your mailing list without asking them and/or
failing to remove them when the so request.  What I find interesting
is that I received a webcast invitation from you in my EnterpriseDB
account earlier this week.  To my knowledge, I have never subscribed
to ANY mailing list from that account, so I'd like to understand how
you got that address and who asked you to add me.  If someone (who?)
at EnterprIseDB provided you with a list of emails and explicitly
authorized you to add those people to your list, fine.  If not, you're
probably doing something you shouldn't be.  Which is it?

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 4:05 AM, Eero Teerikorpi
<eero.teerikorpi@continuent.com> wrote:
> Continuent and EnterpriseDB are partners. We support EnterpriseDB edition of
> the PostgreSQL. And we have few joint customers and prospects, and I would
> naturally welcome even more collaboration.
> As a part of this collaboration effort we have included EnterpriseDB staff
> on our mailing list to get most up to date information about the Tungsten
> offerings. This no different from the fact that EnterpriseDB has most of
> Continuent staff on your mailing list (for example I just received two
> emails from EnterpriseDB earlier this week).
> I am not in position to tell which ones actually have signed up for the
> mailing and which ones has been added by our marketing team because of our
> partnership, I can request our marketing to remove all EnterpriseDB staff
> from our mailing list and ask those who actually would like to see these
> mailings to re-register.

That's probably not necessary.  Like I said originally, if someone at
EDB gave permission, that is fine.  I just wasn't aware of it, but
that's not your fault.

(I did receive two copies of one of the announcements, but that's not
a disaster either.)

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company

Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 4:05 AM, Eero Teerikorpi
> <eero.teerikorpi@continuent.com> wrote:
> > Continuent and EnterpriseDB are partners. We support EnterpriseDB edition of
> > the PostgreSQL. And we have few joint customers and prospects, and I would
> > naturally welcome even more collaboration.
> > As a part of this collaboration effort we have included EnterpriseDB staff
> > on our mailing list to get most up to date information about the Tungsten
> > offerings. This no different from the fact that EnterpriseDB has most of
> > Continuent staff on your mailing list (for example I just received two
> > emails from EnterpriseDB?earlier this week).
> > I am not in position to tell which ones actually have signed up for the
> > mailing and which ones has been added by our marketing team because of our
> > partnership, I can request our marketing to remove all EnterpriseDB staff
> > from our mailing list and ask those who actually would like to see these
> > mailings to re-register.
> 
> That's probably not necessary.  Like I said originally, if someone at
> EDB gave permission, that is fine.  I just wasn't aware of it, but
> that's not your fault.

And I would like to apologize to Continuent because EnterpriseDB
corporate roles have caused undeserved friction between them and the
community.  Hopefully this can all be overlooked.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +

Eero Teerikorpi wrote:
> I will take a look why this happened and I will do my best make sure 
> that you will not get unwanted e-mails from Continuent in the future. 
> The best way you to guarantee not to get additional e-mails from us 
> would use the unsubscribe link (one more time even if you may have 
> done it earlier) in the e-mail Continuent sent you few days ago.

After a few weeks of seeing nothing while they presumably sorted this 
out, Continuent sent out another MySQL announcement this morning to the 
address I left on their list.  For the first time, I no longer saw a 
second copy of it show up on the e-mail address I unsubscribed from.  So 
as far as I can see, Eero has made good on his promise to eventually get 
this problem resolved before starting up new announcements.  If anyone 
else received an unwanted newsletter from them today, my experience is 
that they are doing the right thing when you follow the unsubscribe link 
now.

I hope that the general outrage from this last set of incidents has 
installed enough paranoia about the seriousness of this issue in 
Continuent that they continue to keep on top of this, and eventually 
reverse some of the community hostility over their past mass mailing 
problems.  As someone who's been on both sides of this (running an ISP 
dealing with spam abuse complaints and trying to manage a corporate 
announcement e-mail list with outsourced components), I will attest that 
being a good 'net citizen while also keeping your company marketing 
alive is much harder than you might think.

-- 
Greg Smith  2ndQuadrant US  Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com   www.2ndQuadrant.us