TOT Marketing emails

That guarantees the validity of your email address. I tried that with a charity. Even more spam. I've now blacklisted them>

I thought one of the early MIME RFCs gave some pseudo-code to strip html tags, can't see it now, maybe it was for RTF?

true

Yeah, but they can do that detection as you open the email. Anyway:

An email client shouldn't need to. The sender should include both HTML and text versions.

They are all meant to do that.

Sometimes I would like to receive information on a controlled basis and I consider the option to choose the frequency can be a useful one. You can always say no.

and in the real world.....

In the real world it varies. Some do, some don't. Any reputable sender does, which means that a mail that is html only is more likely to be spam.

And it isnt hard to work out which is the worst unsolicited spam that is going to ignore the unsubscribe.

The only exception I have found is with WebMD which someone suggested I subscribe to which chooses to ignore unsubscribes and is well known for that.

I have the same problem with the Daily Telegraph, and I never asked for them in the first place.

You could also moan at them about the lax security procedure that allows hackers to identify real registered accounts by the sounds of it as well!

(i.e. you never say "account does not exist", just "login failed" with no indication of why)

You mean like the sites where you have to guess if a space in a post code or phone number is acceptable? I've been to sites where if one of the boxes is not what they expect it turns red and doesn't allow continuation. When viewing what is in said box I'm at a loss to see what is wrong - and this is for sites where I do have an account.

And whether you need care about which case you type the postcode in. And when they insist on the wrong county (due to changes many years ago). And when they insist on a home phone number. And when they refuse to allow your address because the PAF files don't yet know about you. And when they refuse to allow forenames of one or two characters. And when your account number has hyphens in but you have to enter it without. And when they refuse to allow "special" characters like apostrophes.

If you're entering username/password, then giving no information other than a generic error message is correct.

By contrast, they should be much more lenient with input when you are entering data such as postcode. If they then want to normalise it and replace what you typed in, all well and good.

They're all ####ing thick. Or maybe it works on the great unwashed?

I thought this was part of the whole point of GDPR, that you were supposed to have to opt-in?

you have the oportunity of opting in when you buy something,

No, not at all.

In the majority of cases, the developer should go to some effort to make the experience as painless as possible for the user, and provide appropriate feedback when something goes wrong. So accept the postcode in any form, or at least indicate in the feedback "postcode must include a space" etc.

The login process is one of those cases where the desire to be helpful (i.e. say "login failed, username not recognised", or "login failed, password incorrect") must be overriden by security, since you dont want to give a bad actor more information than they already have by say rejecting the password in such a way as to confirm the account itself is a real one.

Yup, that's an example of poor design as well, but not related to the point I was making.