I'm not impressed at all to recently find at least two e-mail inboxes being flooded with unwanted electronic QSLs from users of QSL World, a service that has appeared from nowhere in recent days.
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| Site as accessed 02 March 2025. |
It's clear that QSL World, a site registered in January 2024 and with policies updated in January 2025, is scraping email addresses from QRZ.com. Either that, or users sending the QSLs are finding and inserting into the QSLing system themselves.
Either way, I don't want e-QSLs of any form. My native callsign page on QRZ.com is abundantly clear about that. Nobody will ever get one back. I've never consented to receiving emails from QSL World. It's all mightily irritating.
It seems, for now at least, fairly easy to unsubscribe from the system and I've done exactly that, as well as deleting my e-mail addresses from QRZ.com.
As for GDPR and data protection, QSL World has a policy about that. But it's clearly a copy-and-paste job, because the email address to contact about this has the words [Your Contact Email] instead of, er, an e-mail address:
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| Policy as of 02 March 2025. |
Contacting the postman@... address to ask about personal data results in the entirely predictable and despairing auto-reply:
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| E-mail received 02 March 2025. |
QSL World doesn't make it quick to find out who they are. Their 'Contact Informtion' option just takes you back to where you started, revealing nothing. Their domain name registration is private. Only in the Privacy Policy is their address disclosed - it being in... Mexico. An online store is also operated on the same site, though only a clock and t-shirt are offered at the time of writing. It all looks a bit done by a schoolboy sort of site, which only undermines trust in it further.
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| The address is there, but it's not quick to find. The 'merch' part of the site has some Spanish language wording, confirming it's likely Mexican-based. As noted, the indicated e-mail refuses to accept any messages sent to it. |
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| QSL World's address is somewhere around here. |
According to the information, personal data is not sold. It's an open question at the moment as to whether QRZ.com is benefiting in any way from operators' data held on their site and where no consent for data scraping has been given. Certainly, third party cookies are set by use of the QSL World site and that, also, is irksome, if not potentially risky. The fact that their e-mail bounces means nobody can reasonably trust this site.
Altogether, a less-than-glowing entry into the ham world.
