Skype Spam Followup

Skype's team responded to my complaint rather promptly. I was impressed.... until I read the message. It is in full below:

"Thank you for contacting Skype Support. We are truly sorry to hear that you have been experiencing issues using Skype. We have built-in privacy settings that can restrict who are allowed to contact you, but you can still receive new contact invitations. This is done on purpose to give the chance for friends who you don't have in your contact list to let you know that they want to share their contact details with you. Unfortunately, Skype, like any other communications software, has a small minority of users who abuse the software. In order to deal with people who send unsolicited messages, we have resources dedicated to a number of ongoing anti-spam initiatives. To report spam directly from Skype, you need Skype 4.0 for Windows or newer or Skype 2.8 for Mac. Download the latest version if you don?t
have it already: http://www.skype.com/go/download/
In Skype for Mac:
When you get a contact request, choose Block this person from contacting you in the future, then check Report abuse from this person and click Block. To report someone who's sending you instant messages, right click on them in the conversation drawer, and click Block. Then check Report
abuse from this person and click Block. Please note that if the spammers add you to their contact list, you will also see them on your contact list, and you have to delete them manually ( Right click on the contact's name and choose "Remove from Contacts").

We are doing our best to resolve this issue, however, implementing changes and creating new features can take some time. You can rest assured that we're working hard behind the scenes to combat
spam, and will take action against spammers where appropriate with the objective of keeping Skype a productive and friendly place for users like you. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us
again; we will be glad to help.
Best regards,
Csilla
Skype Customer Support"

This response is perfectly polite, but tells me nothing I don't already know and makes NO attempt to deal with the complaint issue. They sent a follow-up email with an invitation to take a survey regarding my experience with customer service.

I answered that I was dissatisfied with the service. In answer to the question "What could we have done differently to satisfy you?" my response was:

"Considering the large amount of people dissatisfied with the Add Contact Request spam received, the addition of a privacy option which allows users to block all such requests would have been the proper response. Instead, I was informed of existing privacy options and told that Skpye wanted to leave the option for "new friends who may not be approved" open. The addition of a privacy option to block works well because, left unchecked, users who WISH to have the option to be contacted by new people are still able to receive these requests, but the massive amount of users who do NOT wish for all this spam have the option to disable it. "

To me, this makes logical sense. It is not a large amount of additional coding, it would satisfy the growing number of unhappy Skype users, and it would not remove the ability to receive requests from those users who DO wish to receive them.

There were also a series of questions regarding my experience with the specific customer service representative. Considering the message sent, I do not feel unjustified in responding with a "Strongly Disagree" to the phrase "The response I received didn't seem canned or automated." I, in fact, believed it to be a canned response up until the point of this question.

Skype Spam Sucks!!!!!

I lodged a complaint to Skype, and I shall also post it here as I discourage people form wasting money on this company.

I have decided not to renew any of my subscriptions, telephone numbers, etc, and also to let my Skype credit run to nothing and not add more. I am also considering uninstalling and never using Skype again. The reason is all the Add Contact spam I'm receiving. I can't stay logged in for more than an hour without getting at least 30 requests. I've set my privacy to not allow anything from people not in my contact list, and I still receive these. When I log in, I set myself to invisible. I still receive these. There have been several complaints logged on the forums, and it has only gotten worse over the last few months despite multiple complaints and an update. Also, finding any way to contact you on this site required multiple hoops and a lot of searching. All of this leads me to believe that Skype does not care for the privacy and satisfaction of their customers. Until this changes, I am not at all inclined to use this, and will furthermore send this complaint to my entire contact list, my twitter folllowers, and post this to my blog to encourage them to discontinue use as well.