Watch where you're clicking

Now, it's not typical but from time to time entering sweepstakes can be the cause for a problem here or there. One example I remember was entering a series of "Win A Trip To _______" which you could only enter if you agreed to receive a promotional packet from the place you may be visiting. My mailman would have had a hernia if they had all arrived on the same day, in the end I had been given packets for probably a good 30-40 locations across the US, small would-be tourist towns mostly. I made the best use I could of them by scouring through to find some possible galleries to show my work in but in the end all I really got was a feeling of guilt and a ton of paper to recycle.

Recently a new mishap has come up.

I should preface this by saying there's all sorts of companies that do promotions, giving away things like ipods and computers, sometimes I can't help but enter even if I'm totally not the intended target audience. Women's magazines hold a huge portion of the market on good potential sweeps... so yeah.

Redbook, the women's magazine constantly has a number of sweepstakes up and running... I've never won one yet but I'm determined that one of these days I'll snag a good win from them. That is if I can avoid repeating my little mishap.

See, I use RoboForm, a fantastic little add-on to my browser, it fills out the basic forms you see on every contest (name, address, email etc etc) and while it makes entering new contests nice and speedy you really have to be careful that you look things over before submitting them. Well, one day I missed something, I glanced the page over, clicked submit and just at that very moment realized "Oh no, I forgot to uncheck the subscribe box". Super, a subscription to Redbook is not on my list of things I need to have.

Still, like most companies Redbook had a email notifier sent to me, I checked it and followed the directions to immediately unsubscribe. "Easy enough" I thought. Sad to say a couple days go by and I get an email invoice for my new subscription. Again I hop on their site, try and unsubscribe but the system doesn't find any info for me.

Another email invoice.

I proceed to contact the customer service center online, write to them to tell them I signed up accidentally, immediately cancelled it, never received an issue, don't want to etc etc...

Yesterday I walk out to check my mailbox for any new wins...