I’ve received many near-identical email messages from an Indian company called Newgen Software over the past year or so. Each one mentions that someone high up in the company will be in Vancouver in the coming weeks, and would like to meet with me to talk about my software development needs.

And each time, I’ve sent a polite — but increasingly terse — “No, thank you; our needs are well met in that department.”

The last time I received one of those messages was on March 24th. I asked them to remove me from their mailing list (again) and added,

Can you understand that this would raise questions for me – not just about your email marketing practices, which have now crossed the line into spam, but about your company’s ability to handle extremely simple customer service requests? If you’re unable or unwilling to respect (or even acknowledge) my wishes at the point in the sales cycle where you’re trying to earn my trust and my business, it makes it very hard to believe your company will handle my business needs with any more professionalism.

Of course, if the answer is that you simply don’t care, and are blasting out emails to some bulk mailing list you purchased or scraped, then I don’t want to have anything to do with your company anyway. I’ll know that’s the case if I receive another of these messages from you.

In closing, I would be happy to receive a reply indicating that you have received this message and removed my company from your mailing list. Other than that, I wish to have no further communication from your company.

Today, I received another email message from Newgen. The boilerplate is identical: someone from the company will be in Vancouver soon and would like to meet with me. Apparently email didn’t work; maybe blogging will.

I’m not sure quite why this bothers me so much. Maybe it’s the disconnect between the chatty tone of their emails and the fact that nobody’s listening at the other end. Maybe I just don’t like having my time wasted.

Here’s my question to you: does this kind of approach actually work for anyone in the software field? Or does it just burn your relationships and, ultimately, your brand?