Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

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Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby tommus » Sat Oct 06, 2018 10:35 am

I signed up with Lingora about two years ago when a new member here, ed101langs, introduced Lingora on the Forum. The initial post and the thread are here:

Lingora's native speaker community - A new and improved version

I didn't become active on Lingora due to the lack of Dutch activity on that site. Nothing happened for the next two years until a couple of weeks ago. I suddenly started to get several emails per day from Lingora asking me to "Please can you help by evaluating (someone's) writing skills. Remember: in return you'll earn valuable Lingorock points for your efforts."

I decided to delete my account in Lingora to avoid getting these emails. But they continued. I sent an email to the site administrator, but the emails keep coming. I have gotten three more this morning and it is only 6:30 AM.

Since ed101langs introduced Lingora here, he has made 21 posts on the Forum. But his last visit here was on 28 May 2018. I wonder if anyone has been getting a bunch of similar emails from Lingora, and if anyone knows how to get them stopped?
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby Brun Ugle » Sat Oct 06, 2018 10:46 am

I have the same problem and can’t stop it. I signed up a long time ago, but I’d signed up using Facebook and it used my real name and Lingora wouldn’t let me change it afterwards. I deleted my account thinking that I would sign up from scratch using my email and some version of Brun Ugle like I do on most sites. Somehow it seems that it didn’t delete my account completely though. When I try to sign up again, it says that an account with that email already exists, but if I try to sign in, it says that my account doesn’t exist. I’ve tried several times over the years and when it happened initially, I sent them an email, but they never answered. Recently, like you, I started receiving massive amounts of email from them. I’ve tried to check again if I could sign in or sign up so that I could stop it, but it still doesn’t work.
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby drmweaver2 » Sat Oct 06, 2018 11:10 am

A couple thoughts...
If you can't actually delete your account, which it sounds like (meaning, you go through the motions but they don't actually delete the account, your info or details), the best way to deal with it is to filter any/all mail from them to spam or trash folders. Then you won't have to deal with it manually (most of the time). :oops:

Create the filter in your email program to include any and all variations of the "From" address you see...
....For ex., @lingora.com, me@lingora.com, lingora.com, custsvc@lingora.com
Additonally, create a filter or filters for the word Lingora in the Subject and Body(of text) areas.
Modify/tune those filters as new emails arrive.
I wound up creating 6 different filters to "block"/deal with 1 particularly determined and persistent emailer who changed the part of his email address to the left of the @ 32 times and the server address (the right side of the @) 5 times over a period of 3 years! :twisted:

I also tend to report as Spam unwanted emails to various whitelist/blacklist(spam filter) organizations. May or may not "help" reduce the number, but if they get "reported" to enough of these organizations, the culprits may end up putting them of the "auto spam" filter list.
Payback is a *****/potential loss of revenue when they aggravate me/others.
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby rdearman » Sat Oct 06, 2018 11:15 am

You can just send it to junk mail. But you can also report them to various email blacklisting services to get there site banned or you can report them to their ISP

small sampling:

http://www.ahbl.org/
http://www.backscatterer.org
http://barracudacentral.org/rbl
http://dnsbl.burnt-tech.com/
http://cbl.abuseat.org/
https://www.dan.me.uk/dnsbl
http://www.dnsbl.info/

You could always report them to their ISP. Take a look at the whois (or tracert) results, and see who is providing them with bandwidth/transit. Reporting to them would probably get a better response then reporting to some random blacklist.

These steps are a bit drastic but since you have already tried to have them resolve the issue for you this can be the next step.
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sat Oct 06, 2018 12:15 pm

interesting... I’ve been experiencing this in the last few days as well.
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby lingua » Sun Oct 07, 2018 12:08 am

I also started getting these emails in the last week. I changed my setting to not get emails from users but it seems not to have helped. I considered cancelling it but I thought I'd see if the emails stopped first.

On the ones I received the subject always included "new text" or "new audio" so I filtered on that and it has worked 100% since.

I only logged on there once to see what it was like when the person came to this site and mentioned it but since there was little activity I never returned.
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby tommus » Mon Oct 08, 2018 10:44 am

Progress!

I sent a tweet to Lingora Twitter explaining the situation and pointing out that several other people on a language learning site were also trying to cancel their accounts. Within 10 minutes, I got an email from the co-founder of Lingora, apologising for the situation. He promised that it would be fixed and take effect within 24 hours. Lets hope so.
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby tommus » Thu Oct 11, 2018 11:34 am

Looks like that tweet worked. I haven't received any Lingora emails in three days.

How have others been doing?
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:00 am

I’m still having problems with them. My original problem was that I’d signed up using Facebook and it used my real name and I couldn’t change that in my profile. I deleted the account thinking I could sign up using my email and a different user name, but when I tried to sign up it said my email was already in use and yet if I tried to sign in using my original account, it said the account didn’t exist. I tried writing a few times using the contact address, but never received a reply. I eventually gave up until I started getting drowned in email notifications from them.

In December I answered one of the many emails I received from them and told them, in somewhat stronger language this time, that I was having a problem, that I’d deleted my account long ago, but they still clearly had my information in their database. This time I got an answer saying they’d checked the database and it was now deleted. Everything seemed okay until a few weeks ago when I started getting more email notifications. I tried unsubscribing. When I clicked unsubscribe, the webpage that came up said I was unsubscribed. At the same time, I decided to check the login page and had the same results as before they deleted my information. In addition, it looks like the log in/ sign up pages are not secure. I considered contacting them, but I was a bit busy, so I put it off. Then this morning, I woke up to 26 new email notifications from them. So, now I’ve written again. If they don’t fix the problem this time, I might have to remind them of the existence of certain laws regarding the handling of people’s personal data.

Anyway, if you don’t have an account with Lingora already, I would strongly advise against signing up for one. I like the idea of being able to get corrections, but until they work out how to properly handle people’s personal data, it’s too risky to have an account there.
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Re: Unwanted barrage of emails from Lingora

Postby PeterMollenburg » Tue Feb 19, 2019 10:53 am

tommus wrote:Progress!

I sent a tweet to Lingora Twitter explaining the situation and pointing out that several other people on a language learning site were also trying to cancel their accounts. Within 10 minutes, I got an email from the co-founder of Lingora, apologising for the situation. He promised that it would be fixed and take effect within 24 hours. Lets hope so.


I did similar via email. I stated I didn’t want the spam-like messages or I’d prefer my account closed. While they said they would attempt to resolve it, it still continued. I emailed again, and they preferred to cancel my account (I stated if they couldn’t stop it, I’d rather not be a member anymore). It seems they either have every intention to continue ‘spamming’, have an automated system that’s difficult to tweak, or both. I’m not sad to see the end of it.
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