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Yup, the "Spam" button is a true signal. A company I worked for had problems with the number of times people hit 'spam' on the emails (not even a newsletter, bu
by civilian 9y ago
Yup, the "Spam" button is a true signal. A company I worked for had problems with the number of times people hit 'spam' on the emails (not even a newsletter, but transactional emails), and AWS SimpleEmailService put us on probation. I got to write a worker task that would consume the queue of "someone marked you as spam" from SES and remove them from our email list.
- austinjp 9y agoForgive the naivety, can you explain a little? From what I understand from this: You sent emails from AWS to subscribers. Some recipients hit the spam button in Gmail. You received a message for every email that had been flagged as spam, including the recipient details. Is that correct? What exactly happens when I hit the spam button in Gmail?
- BillinghamJ 9y agoYes that’s correct. Email senders are informed when you mark email as spam so they can add you to an unsubscribe list automatically.
- flukus 9y agoSounds like an easy way to verify active email addresses.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- civilian 9y agoIt is! But it's better just to check the SES queue for "email was delivered".
- BillinghamJ 9y agoYeah the SMTP protocol handles verification of mailbox existence already.
- austinjp 9y agoThis is very odd. I thought the "mark as spam" button was entirely within Gmail. I had no idea it sent a message to the email sender. Is this standard? It seems counter productive, since it confirms the spam was received. I want it to fail silently and disappear forever. What should I be doing, to achieve silent spam disposal within Gmail? I hope I don't have to set filters myself, that would defeat the entire purpose of a smart system that learns to recognise spam. Edit: we're talking about "mark as spam", not "unsubscribe", right?
- BillinghamJ 9y agoYep.
- tyingq 9y agoGmail parses the email for an unsubscribe link and asks if you want to unsubscribe. If you say yes, it follows the link for you. See this: https://lifehacker.com/5319723/gmail-offers-to-automatically-unsubscribe-you-from-mailing-lists https://lifehacker.com/5319723/gmail-offers-to-automatically...
- jlgaddis 9y agoThe next time you get such an e-mail, look through the headers (available via "Show Original" in Gmail, IIRC) for a "List-Unsubscribe:" header. This value will usually be an HTTP URL (it can also be a "mailto:"). That (unique) URL (which is tied to your e-mail address) is then followed in order to unsubscribe you from the list.
- mook 9y agoApologies, I'm a little confused. How would a transactional email put somebody into a mailing list so that they could be removed? Shouldn't they not be in the list in the first place?
- civilian 9y agoThe transactional email wasn't adding someone to a newsletter. But you can mark 'spam' on any email at all, and some people felt that our anniversary-of-them-signing-up emails or "you've had a problem being billed" emails were spam, so they hit the button. idk man! People are crazy. We also had marketing emails through mailchimp, but they were totally separate systems.
- mook 9y agoAh. I'd have marked the former as spam too (it's an advertisement reminding the recipient you exist, not something in response to a transaction just committed / something they did), but the latter seems plenty safe. But then, I have no idea how you'd be correlate the transactional mail to the marketing mails anyway (I'd use separate addresses for that). If somebody added my address to a list I didn't sign up for, any mail from them would just be a reminder they did so... It wouldn't be hard to imagine somebody marking everything in the future as spam automatically after glancing at the sender name.