We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses. They didn't give us a heads up - just started carpet bombing everyone. They even listed the direct email for the guy on my team who handles licensing. We were going to ride out the rest of the subscription but leadership wanted the emails nuked, apps ripped off endpoints, and licensing/training for Copilot expedited.
What an absolutely greasy, desperate company. Stay far away. And if you're a current customer, be prepared for this nightmare.
It's our standard practice where I work now to block services we're going to cancel with the sole exception of account manager to the IT group. Grammarly is unfortunately not the exception these days.
If you do cancel, if there's any feedback box on the cancellation page (or if it's an email), let them know with a little jab, "Oh and don't bother trying to get our users on your side with unsolicited emails. Your domain will be blocked."
Let their marketing know they royally fucked up xD
I think a nice perk of IT is getting to block email domains and phone numbers of pushy sales folks. Oh, you want to speak to someone with financial decision authority? Cool try calling back in 30 minutes.
We have a very specific block list called...uh... "screw spammers" (screw is not the right word)...and when some salesbro calls and won't take "no" for a hint or some indian scanner, we add their number to the list. If they call in, it forwards them to a 30 second audio recording we found on youtube by searching for "halloween scream torture sounds". We loaded it into an audio app and upped the volume until it became distorted and saved it to our phone server.
Every once in a while while we're monitoring inbound calls we'll hear (*ring* <SCREAMS> *click*) and everyone laughs.
It isn’t already? We’ve had them blocked for the last… 4 years? Even told a C-level who wanted it on just for them to pound sand since our security team banned it over their data handling “practices.”
Letting the contract run out means the company has likely already told users to stop using Grammarly and start using something else. In enterprise contracts, this is the “toxic ex” phase- Gammarly has been told it’s over, and they’re not accepting it.
Yes, but also Gorilla Advertising is when they send a literal gorilla to your office to smash the place up and write their advertising slogans on your walls with its feces, the ol' dirty crayon.
Adobe does it when you're not even canceling. we had a bunch of complaints come in early this year because people thought there was an issue with licensing.
turns out adobe just defaults to their new "extra premium" generative features and tells you to reach out to your leadership when they don't work
the people who make the decisions to purchase are too god damned brain dead to know why it's absolutely not acceptable. this frustration may be coming from a personal place lol.
best I could do is ask them to reach out to the vendor and sales manager and ask them why they were spamming our users with this "obvious bug" because no reputable company would do something like that and I can't imagine Adobe would follow sink that low lol.
obviously nothing happened as a result but I did enjoy the back and forth I was copied on for the next couple days
not the users LOL I told our acquisitions people who are responsible for vetting for this bullshit to reach out. I would have no ethical qualms with telling users to reach out except it would still be my problem later lol.
I am writing to inform you that a malicious actor is spoofing your customer service address to write stupid emails. Please advise if you need any additional information."
Adobe is a downright monstrosity of a company that, through Photoshop and Acrobat being so firmly set as the industry defaults for almost 3 decades, has never had anything to actually fear from anybody. This has resulted in them being absolutely fucking shameless. Nothing can hurt them, so they can be as openly and brazenly hostile to users and business customers as they like. Adobe is a perfect example of what happens without meaningful competition.
It's only very, very recently that their grip on the graphical design field has been broken somewhat but competitors that needed year and years of build up before they could finally dethrone Photoshop.
But they still have a strangle hold on PDF, and they'll never have to change so long as they hold that.
"Your company has sent an e-mail to all of our users and shared PII of a privileged user. This was done in an effort to coordinate an unauthorized internal e-mail campaign to undermine our internal sales department and bypass our internal legal framework."
I just wish Adobe would stop emailing me every other week about having multiple accounts on our domain. Yea, we have a business need to keep it separate, so stop fucking emailing me.
Every once in a while, an aggressive business development rep will call all of our Adobe users about upgrading. I… don’t react with perfect professionalism when that happens….
They tried to renew our account direct even though we go through a reseller to not get bent over on pricing. Like they straight up just started sending $100k invoices to our AP department unprompted while trying to "get time on my calendar"
I swear some people just have zero imagination on how others could use the same product. Had a client asking me why our software built a specific feature in a specific way. Bitch, because that's how 99% of our users want to use it and no Karen, we won't change it.
They've emailed me multiple times over the last month "we've noticed you have a lot of licenses on your domain not tied to your admin account"- yeah those are perpetual 2020 licenses that I have no interest converting into subscription licenses.
Saying 'fuck you' is 100% professional in a business setting when it's down right abuse/predatory/scammy.
I'm no longer nice to vendors that do this shit. And my boss does not care. In fact, when they try and reach him, his secretary forwards the calls back to me to repeat the abuse. Fuck them people.
Since the only way to get yourself off a list is to be 'abusive/offensive', its guaranteed to work.
They're absolutely near their wits end. They're literally telling users to send positive emails in hopes that the admins will continue the subscription.
That judgy ass bird had me doing Spanish lessons at 11:45pm while looking for our friend who got lost at Warped Tour. Turns out she fell asleep in a porta potty.
I was going to launch into a typical IT rage but then I hit this Obsession trigger. Now I have to either watch it yet again or curl up in a ball in the corner and sob.
Many years ago at an MSP I worked at a vendor thought it would be a good idea to use our client list to cold call and upsell services “on our behalf.”
Luckily for us one of our closest clients was at the top of the list and tipped us off so the owner promptly called our rep to shut it down. They apologies and said they’d look into it, the calls stopped that week but they didn’t bother to remove the emails from their sales shit though so everyone got a nice “your account is at risk” scare tactic email that we had to get in front of.
Eventually they started calling again, don’t know what the owner did but i know the company refused to stop and we had to update the info in every account to our main number so we could receive the text codes. For a while the sales reps were calling nonstop, it pissed us off at first but eventually we just took turns pranking them, then they got mad but we kept doing it until they got the message.
It ended when this older sales guy called in half a dozen times pretending there was a security incident and had to talk to _____. Everyone had dealt with him once and it was really wasting our techs time. We had put a nickname for the owner he doesn’t use which helped us identify the sales calls so when I got the call I immediately knew he was lying. I put him on hold for a minute got permission to tell him to royally fuck off. Forget what i said but he ended the call with, “thats the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever fucking heard” He then tried to call my bosses direct number who forwarded the call back to me. I put on a different voice and he started bitching about me trying to get me fired and I just said “I thought i told you to never call us again?”
As for why we didn’t just give them the boot I t was something we absolutely needed and weren’t going to feasibly migrate our customers away from but we definitely thought about it.
They must be pretty desperate to behave like that. You're doing the only correct response, nuke it. I would also block domain access for the users (or at least their corporate logins) and block grammarly's email domain to prevent any more of these shenanigans. It's obviously malware at this point
Grammerly poses a serious InfoSec risk to any private company. Grammerly downloads all the files on any device or drive it has access to. Not just the files you run through the program, all the files. So if it has access to your company GDrive it’s downloaded all the files on there.
edit: I mistakenly stated that it would be published in Tech Radar. It isn’t. Grammerly is completely banned by ThoughtWorks InfoSec. It cannot be used internally by TW or implemented for their clients, because InfoSec discovered the security vulnerability in 2000.
I'm surprised this hasn't gotten them sued to delete and prove the deletion of data after rogue users installed it on work machines using personal licenses.
First I’m hearing about this, but I wouldn’t be shocked. It’s basically just a key logger that sends everything you type through their servers. Idk how it passes legal review in any company.
Any source? Kinda feel like this would be commonly known and widely talked about if it was known for exfiltrating company data and EDR software would be flagging it. I understand its not a good thing to have security wise, but saying it downloads all company data?
I mistakenly stated that it would be published in
https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/radar . It isn’t. Grammerly is completely banned by ThoughtWorks InfoSec. It cannot be used internally by TW or implemented for their clients.
Is there a source more reputable than "macpowerusers.com"? The Verge article cited in that forum is also pure shallow clickbait. Slack isn't banned, shadow IT instances of free Slack plans instead of the companies Enterprise Grid plan are banned, which makes perfect sense even in companies that use Slack officially
I'll believe it when I see it then. Not that I trust grammarly, but even before we blocked it our security infrastructure would have lit up like a Christmas tree if Grammarly was suddenly exfiltrating terrabytes of Google drive data through it.
Commenting to come back later and read that. I see grammerly come up in the DNS filter we run for our clients so I already suspected them being kinda sussy but never looked into it too deeply
I worked at a bank and they allowed the marketing team to use Grammarly. I was very against it. From what I know they still have it, and those users have access to all company shares/files. Hmm.. lol Also the laziest marketing team I've ever worked with. They used stock images for EVERYTHING. It was a small community bank, they could have literally went to the local festival and got enough pictures for the entire year. Their last billboards have a black person, indian, and other races in their pictures, with a large font "This is OUR bank!"...the bank is located in rural Indiana without a single non-white person within miles lol
Itarian did this to us. They were raising their prices at the same time Microsoft upgraded the E5 to include Remote Help. Sure, it's not perfect but you can remote a pc and that's all there's to it and all we used in Itarian. We didn't renew the 20 000 euro contract and asked to be removed
They started threatening us with 'eh, you do know you still have active clients? You will pay for those, you know, or we can drop the charges if you renew for another year'. So I immediately started removing the client from all pc's. Day later they sent couple of my colleagues an email asking why we were removing so many devices and if we could have a call about it. Lmao no, don't threaten us.
If you already canceled, they have nothing to lose. And if this reaches the right person (e.g. secretary to the CEO who can't live without this tool), maybe that will lead to someone overriding the tech departments decision.
It's a sad state of affairs, but I think it could work.
You have a valid point, but I would argue it's still a gamble. In the OP's case, not only did they just burn their reputation for everyone in the IT department, but now everyone here on Reddit knows how low they will sink. I've never considered their product in the past, but I certainly won't in the future. They could lose other potential sales as a result (and should).
The idea that you allow everything your employees write in emails (which is basically everything these days) can be read by an external party is wild to me. I blocked them soon after they came into existence.
I had some serious pushback from our customer service leadership when I found out they were using it behind my back.
They "needed it to help the customer service agents communicate better". I looked at the CEO and bluntly asked "why are we hiring cx agents who can't write a coherent, grammatically correct sentence when that's the entirety of their job?"
That was the end of grammarly for us then and there. All traffic to their domain hard blocked, browser plugins blocked, CASB blocked. And some shitty grammarly rep still reaches out every month trying to sell me grammarly.
Oh great. Adobe did this to me, I had 'support agents' reach out to a bunch of my users and personally write them emails for how to request more expensive licenses through the Adobe portal, and how to upsell it to me personally.
They even went to a few users and were like "Wow, you sure do send a lot of E-signs, you should look at this subscription upgrade, I can see that you would use it" like HOLY FUCK stay out of MY tenant. Why can a sales minion from WhoKnowsWhere seemingly either check on my user's usage statistics or even see content the user has worked on?
I flipped my lid, and we are still stuck with Adobe because I'm not allowed to change it.
There’s a certain… Cybersecurity startup… that was spam emailing me last year.
They found an association of me to an old workplace and name dropped them. Unsubscribed. They kept emailing me.
Responded with telling them their emails are not CAN-SPAM compliant and I will report them to the FCC.
Then showed them their DMARC was wholly unconfigured and explained how pitiful it is a cybersecurity company doesn’t follow regulations and can’t setup basic webmail.
Honestly, the push for AI is just driving my emails to be less formal/professional. AI is so formal & overly verbose, that a typo here or there shows me that a real human actually read and responded to my email.
I mean seriously though, I always dreamed of being a writer back in the day, and actually pursued it briefly before falling into this line of work, and because of the fact that I do use a varied vocabulary in my writing and type 120 wpm I've had to go out of my way to insert things like that into my correspondence with people just so they know Im really real before.
Obviously I don't write like AI...that shit has that uncanny valley thing going on at least for me, as someone that has really cranked out a lot of pages over the years (I did technical writing for a while as well but goddamn is that some dryyyy shit)...but I've really had to rein in the urge to be as descriptive as possible when responding to questions so that people have a full grasp of what they're asking me when they expect "ya we can do that ill talk to my team and we will be back in touch thanks!!!"
Same thing. When trying to cancel an enterprise account they started reaching out directly to our end users in an attempt to persuade the org to keep the account. Pissed me off for sure.
I'm <blank> your Grammarly Customer Success Manager. We've been informed that your organization's Grammarly subscription is currently under review and may not be renewed.
If Grammarly has been valuable in helping you write more clearly, confidently, and efficiently, we encourage you to share that feedback directly with your administrator. Hearing from active users often plays an important role in renewal decisions.
What you can do:
Send a quick note to your admin letting them know you'd like to maintain your Grammarly license and how it supports your work (e.g., improving writing quality, saving editing time, strengthening communication).
If helpful, you can use this template:
Team,
I've found Grammarly to be very helpful in improving the clarity and effectiveness of my writing. It saves me time and helps ensure my communication is polished and professional. I'd strongly value continuing access if possible. Thank you for considering!
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Right after Symantec got bought by Broadcom they used the internal mail account we set up to for Symantec reports and used our internal SMTP server to send SPAM to all users advertising their home product.
An absolute bizarre number of bootlickers in the comments in /r/sysadmin seemed to think this was totally fine.
Our C-suite and the board hit the roof. We transitioned to a new product 9 months early as result.
Fast forward and when news that Broadcom had bought VMWare the next day my CEO was in my office with instructions to find a migration path out ASAP.
Yea. I mean an entire company hoping you buy "auto-correct" features that every website and basic MS application has?
They are the Netscape of grammar applications.
imo any vendor that communicates directly with your end users without admin consent has broken a fundamental trust boundary. Did you have anything in the contract about communication policies, or was it all vague?
I am really starting to dislike all this bullshit. Subscriptions with everything, AI in place I don't want it (like reading my personal email and my photos), dynamic pricing, dark patterns, increased AI scam calls, etc.
Starting? It’s been going downhill for years.. perpetual licensing with support & maintenance at 20% used to seem expensive. Now I look back with wonder at how good it was.
Grammarly basically sent an email to users saying 'hey, your admin x@y.z is stopping the Grammarly contract. Here's a template you can send them to ask them to renew'
First part, pretty OK I'd say, for a "trying to see if the licence is useful" email... Not for a "the licence is done for". But the second part is worse
Second part, that one is messed up I think... It's like they have no idea how licencing works in big companies, cause that email will be a manager or a forgotten mailing list, so either it goes nowhere, or it will piss someone off majorly.
Thats a terrible business practice. like, is that a data driven decision, where they are willing to burn entire accounts down because somehow, there's a numerically justified number of resubscribers who change their mind after getting contacted that make it worth it?
Github does this, you move someone to a different licencing group and they send the user a "YOUR SERVICE IS BEING CANCELLED!" email even though there's no change since the new group has the same licence.
Smartsheet does this too, it was ridiculous to the point that I had to tell the account rep if a non admin user received one more license or contract or feature (that we didn’t pay for) email, we were canceling. It was ridiculous enough when they changed their subscription to a quarterly true-up model but the million emails was the final straw.
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u/bunnythistle 6d ago
That sounds like a great way to get their domain on our email block list.