I seriously dislike 'Auto Renewals' of anything and this weekend I almost overlooked the following email from AOL that had been tagged by my SPAM filter last week:

>Relax, we'll take care of it for you.
>Date: February 7, 2004 4:01:28 PM PST
>To: alan@homebythesea.com
>Reply-To: memberhelp@fool.com

>Dear Fool,

>Your subscription to Motley Fool Community will be automatically renewed
>in 2 weeks. We will send you another notice after we have billed your
>account. We appreciate your continued support of The Motley Fool
>Community.

>Your rebill price is $29.95

>We're so happy you'll be with us for another year.

Well, I discovered I could renew for only $25/year by navigating over to AOL's "Join Us Now" page,

http://www.fool.com/landing/pb/pb_land.htm?source=istfocfmt100183

selecting "Join Now', and then selecting the two year option.

Note that you will find no "Extend your Subscription" option there ...

I successfully proceeded on as described above to see what would happen and found that by the end of the process, the Motley Fool 'cookies' on my machine had apparently informed AOL's computer during that process, that I was in fact extending my subscription rather than initiating a new one.

I continue to find this forum to be outstanding and well worth paying for ... but I will never appreciate a machine auto-renewing me for anything (especially when it is charging me a premium price for that service).

--alan

I am livid. I received a similar email, and I HATE the sneaky tactics of the companies that not only 'auto-renew by default', but also do not provide a way to turn this off.
I emailed FOOLs explicitely instructing them not to renew my subscription (I got nearly 0 value out of it). And guess what my card was just charged $99.
Great customer service!

Cheers

>> I am livid. I received a similar email, and I HATE the sneaky tactics of the companies that not only 'auto-renew by default', but also do not provide a way to turn this off. <<

You can subscribe to just about anything with one click of a button, but it always takes a few phone calls to cancel, so it seems. And then you deal with the hard sell of trying to change your mind.

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