I despise irresponsible mass-emailers like JibJab.

A truly unfortunate real estate team in California was horrified yesterday to find that JibJab (jibjab.com) pissed off legions of their customers as a direct result of JibJab’s inept and irresponsible practices (which are also, in my non-legal-expert opinion, illegal under CAN-SPAM).

The agents’ intent was simply to blast out a holiday card to their email list via JibJab. It became, in their words in the apology they then had to email to their entire email list, a “debacle” and “nightmare”.

By irresponsible (and possibly illegal), I refer to the fact that when JibJab sent an email on behalf of the agents, they did not provide any opt-out link. In my opinion, that seems to be a fine-worthy CAN-SPAM violation because these were not transactional emails.

By inept, I refer to the fact JibJab blasted many duplicate emails to the same recipients, which in the words of the agents made “tons of people angry at us.” (Even if we allow the possibility - although I have no reason to believe this is the case- that the agents somehow submitted duplicate requests to send the same ecard to their list, JibJab is still in my opinion woefully incompetent for allowing the same card to be sent to the same recipient from the same account multiple times.)

As an example of JibJab’s ineptness, here is a copy of our inbox for one day:

Naturally, JibJab does not answer their support phone (the greeting tells you to email them), and they (thus far) have ignored both email we sent alerting them of the dual issues of repeat sending and no opt-out mechanism. (I tried contacting JibJab within minutes of the first duplicate, so they could have saved countless pissed off recipients had they offered real-time support option.)

Ironically, JibJab’s most recent tweet boasts their product “keeps on giving” but I think we can all agree that blasting 29 duplicates isn’t something to boast about.

I can only wonder how many hard-earned customers and prospects JibJab customers have lost due to JibJab’s ineptness and irresponsibility.