"As many of you know, things have changed a bit at the Standard since you received your last newsletter..... If you were a subscriber to any other Standard newsletter, you have automatically been added to the Intelligencer list."

Ya know, if I had wanted a weekly tech business news ezine from The Standard, I darn well would have checked that box when I signed up for the newsletters there that I really did want to get. This is really spam-like. At the very least, definitely opt-out which these days is getting fairly shady (not to mention illegal in some countries.)

Plus, I can't imagine that it will do advertisers any good. Sure they'll get a higher "reach" officially -- but I'll bet the open rates and click throughs for subscribers like me who were forcibly added to the list are really low. Some people will say, hey stop whining you anti-spam purist! Just unsubscribe. OK. (But it still makes me think The Standard's corpse has started to stink.)