It turns out that every college ever (except the ones that I'm actually interested in attending) is "interested", at least interested enough to flood my inbox, both virtual and physical, with the same unpersonalized junk all day every day. Half of these seem to be offers for some sort of guide to finding the right college, many say something like "find your ____ at _____", and still others are "people" wondering whether I got their first e-mail and/or waiting for a response.
I delete them all.
There is absolutely nothing useful about these e-mails. They are literally all the same. When I need to decide what I'm looking for in a college, I can go to my high school's college counselor. At least she actually knows (roughly) what fields I'm interested in. I'm not sure why these colleges market themselves to me as "liberal arts" when I am (and marked on the optional "possible college major" section that I am) a math/CS/physics/science/anything-but-liberal-arts person.
It is interesting that some colleges set up "individual" "web sites" for me: subdomains of their web site, named after me. Unfortunately for them, I understand exactly how this works, and it requires zero nonautomatable work: have a wildcard "*.whatever.tld." DNS entry that goes to your site and use URL rewriting (ISAPI) to mash the requested URL into a page request that results in the auto-generation of a "personal" page.
I've been clicking the tiny, sometimes almost invisible, "Unsubscribe" links for a while now, but the e-mails still keep coming in. Sometimes, the link is broken (404 error) or even nonexistent. I've considered reporting the latter to the FCC, but I don't understand the complaint form.
Anyway, the lesson you can learn here is don't check that box. You'll regret it.
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