In 2008 I joined SAGE (the System Administrators’ Guild of Australia). It was a professional society for people doing sysadmin work (running computer servers). I quit when I found that the level of clue was lower than hoped and that members used the code of ethics as nothing but a way to score points in online debates. After quitting SAGE kept emailing me and wouldn’t respect my request to be removed from all lists so I had to block their mail server.
SAGE has in recent times changed it’s name to ITPA (Information Technology Professionals Association) and is still sending me email. I’ve just sent yet another unsubscribe request.
How many years of sending unwanted email can be caused by incompetence and when should we assume it’s malice? They have been doing this for over a decade now. Even if it’s incompetence, that’s still damning given that it’s incompetence in the main topic of the organisation.
Here is the ITPA Code of Ethics [1], as you can see there is no reference to spam. The nearest seems to be “I will continue to enlarge my understanding of the social and legal issues that arise in computing environments, and I will communicate that understanding to others when appropriate“. So it’s great that they aren’t breaking their own code of ethics :-# but I’d still like them to stop emailing me.