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Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users shou

• lsc 11y ago
  >Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. See, you still seem to think that it's a negotiation between the senders and the receivers. My point is that you don't have the right to the end-user's attention. If the end-user wants to hire someone to filter out messages they don't want to read, using whatever criteria for "don't want to read" that they like, this is the user's right. (more relevant to the discussion, the email that is technically spam is pretty easy to block already, so a solution that requires a lot of social/political change is inferior to the technical measures we have in place.)
  • johnmaguire2013 11y ago
    Re-read the bit you quoted. > Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. i.e. Yes, it should be the user's control, not the hosting company's, not the sending server's.
• marcosdumay 11y ago
  Spam is anything that clogs my inbox and makes the emails I want to receive harder to find. But I agree, SMTP is not where email organization should happen. Blocking illegitimate senders at the protocol level is the most that should be done, and the blocking of unwanted content should be pushed into a more user oriented layer. Current structure isn't optimal.
• jschwartzi 11y ago
  If it's all the same to you, it seems to me that everybody and their mother has a daily or bi-daily newsletter advertising things I don't care about. I think maybe 15 companies are responsible for the vast majority of mail arriving in my inbox, and I care for none of it. Marketing routinely mistakes quantity for quality, as if yelling your message louder is sufficient for mindshare. I'm really glad that gmail sorts these emails into a place where I don't have to ignore them, because I used to flag them as spam whether or not I might have accidentally given consent 10 years ago by buying something once. It was making email as useful as physical mail(read: not at all). Just because I bought something from you once does not mean we have a relationship, just as a one-night stand does not entitle you to ask me to help you move.
  • c22 11y ago
    I used to have your problem, then I clicked on the "unsubscribe" link in those 15 company's emails and now I mostly just get email from real people and robots I need information from.
• wl 11y ago
  > Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam. If you didn't ask my permission to send me those promotional emails, they absolutely are spam and anyone who sends them should have their emails blocked. This rationalization that spamming is ok because the recipient is a customer and there is an unsubscribe mechanism is delusional self-interest.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Its also law. Do Not Call for instance doesn't apply to companies you have a relationship with. That's why some major banks 'affiliate' with 100's of companies, essentially selling the right to spam their customers. Its screwed up, sure. But its the state we're in right now.
    • wl 11y ago
      I made no claims about legality. Yes, CAN SPAM means you can spam legally. It doesn't make unsolicited commercial email anything other than spam.