Or if you don't - don't reveal ANY personal information at all.

I still get emails from the Ministry of Sound even now after the saga which I will tell you about. This said it *may* be from a different source than from them direct - I'm not entirely sure yet.

Anyway...this takes place over a year ago when I was on a modem connection to the internet and I was living in university halls of residence without a university internet connection. So I was paying for my internet connection at about 5p per minute (a rip off monopoly phone company).

Somehow - I have no idea how, I got placed on the Ministry of Sound mailing list. I don't know why this happened but it's something I wouldn't have wished upon my worst enemy.

One day I was downloading my email as normal and I thought my mail program had hung as nothing was happening at all. So I closed it down and then restarted it and it was still "downloading mail" - so I left it reluctantly as it was wasting my phonebill but might have been something important.
I come back later and find that an email from "Ministry of Sound" has arrived. I take a look at it and it's got a one megabyte attachment on it. I'm a bit peeved at this as I didn't ask for anything - then I discover what they've sent me is a .exe file. (For those of you who don't know - it's an executable file that means a virus/trojan can be run when you run it so wrecking your computer or allowing unauthorised access. I'm not speculating as to whether it did, but as a matter of policy I never run unsolicited exe files I recieve.

I followed their instructions on how to unsubscribe and when I logged on later I found I'd recieved a email saying my unsubscription had been sent to an invalid email address.

I left it and hoped they'd just go away.

They didn't.

A week or so later I recieved another huge exe file which
yet again wasted my phonebill and went straight in the bin. This time I scoured the Ministry of Sound's website for contact details and I found none. I collected all the email addresses I could find on the site and sent a mail saying "get me the hell off this list" to all of them.

Then a few days later I got another attachment. I then resorted to finding out the company that designed and maintained their website and emailed them - no response.

Finally when I got more emails I called up directory enquiries and got the company phone number of the MoS. I called up and left a message on a woman's answering machine threatening legal action (as they are actually breaking the law with unsolicited advertisements) if they didn't remove me. I got a phonecall back VERY soon afterwards.
The woman I spoke to was quite helpful and promised to remove me as soon as possible from the mailing list.

For a while I did stop getting the emails and I certainly haven't got any more of the huge emails thank god, although now I'm on ADSL it wouldn't matter so much.

Anyway - the website itself is ok, if not a bit high-intensive on the ole internet connection.

I hope this will save you the trouble and money I had with the Ministry of Sound. So be warned!

Ken