6 ms·

The theory says it's easy to be delisted, but some very large Telcos have given up and they don't try to be delisted anymore. This task can be very time consumi

The theory says it's easy to be delisted, but some very large Telcos have given up and they don't try to be delisted anymore. This task can be very time consuming and they only focus on prefixes of their static pool or business services. For example, prefixes of Telefónica de España have been included in Spamhaus Zen for a while: https://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ https://www.spamhaus.org/zen/. Mailinator is a hack to workaround the spam flood. But for trustable business, the anonymity of the disposable addresses is a big problem because it is not possible to start a marketing process (if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam...). More and more companies deny registration from Disposable Email Addresses. Because these users are worthless. Spam is a plague that hurts good users and trustable business.

Sir_Substance 8y ago
>if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Sympathetic customer fallacy. Figuring out how to get new paying customers through the door is not the problem of everyone who considers trying your product. Expectations that trial users should "pay" by taking on the burden of having to tell your marketing department to go away if they aren't interested enough to buy it on their own initiative is reality denial. Obviously people aren't going to do that, and spending effort trying to "disposable-email-proof" your trial system is a bottomless pit into which you will pour money for all eternity. People are actually paying money to the disposable email companies to have them actively combat you. You will never complete that project and you will never be able to stop spending on it. Ideally your trial is persuasive enough to have a steady trickle of people decide to buy the full product, but not so generous they feel that they'll get the full experience by cycling disposable email addresses. Finding that balance is the responsibility of your business, no one else will change their behavior to do it for you. If you can't find it, maybe that's a sign that you've made a product that maps poorly to sustaining a business. One might call this the "bittorrent inc" strategic mistake. Always remember to stay grounded in reality.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  This is a fantastic summary, thank you! I use disposeable mails all the time, and any company that refuses to accept them either gets a bogus hotmail account or (more likely) loses a chance to show me what they've built. Otoh, if I want their messages I will leave an address willingly - not my main address of course, but an alias.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Calling something a “fallacy” is the fallacy fallacy: a mistaken believe in the authority of a made-up concept. In this case, certain norms of conduct in business do exist, and they do often serve all market participants, and businesses have every right, and often succeed, in enforcing them. I’m not sure about the specific example here, as I happen to live in a jurisdiction where it’s illegal to follow up on a trial subscription with endless marketing emails. But, as just one example, cancelling an appointment you can’t kept us not just “sympathetic”. It’s basic manners, it improves life for everyone (including you), and nobody would be surprised that not following the norm could get you banned.
  - Sir_Substance 8y ago
    > In this case, certain norms of conduct in business do exist Rejected. You don't get to declare norms by fiat, sorry. >It’s basic manners, it improves life for everyone (including you), and nobody would be surprised that not following the norm could get you banned. Manners are for humans to humans. I don't feel the need to be polite to a trial subscription system. It's a piece of software, it won't feel bad if I don't respond to its mails later on.
- wpietri 8y ago
  100% agreed. One of the things that I think people have a hard time grasping is that for a lot of software, the marginal cost of a user is approximately zero. People get stuck in a scarcity mindset and get really upset at the notion of freeloaders getting away with something. This is in sharp contrast to the abundance mindset you see in most open-source software. How many people are Linux freeloaders or Mozilla freeloaders or Gnu freeloaders? Hundreds of millions, and once you count devices, maybe billions. But as long as those outfits can pay the bills, they don't care. The funny part to me is that so many people trapped in scarcity thinking only care about getting paid, not paying others. How many of those people trying to capture every dollar of generated value are using open-source tools in what they're selling without giving back? Most of them, I'm sure.
mmt 8y ago
> Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam From a legal standpoint, this is broadly true, but I'd say from a user's perspective, this is only very narrowly true. For example, if I'm receiving an advertisement for a product that I "freely" trialed but subsequently rejected, I perceive it as spam. Reputable companies provide an "unsubscribe" feature that actually works, but it's impossible to determine a priori which companies those are, and, more importantly, if they'll still be that way when that first e-mail arrives. Really, the most trustworthy behavior would be to assume I'm consenting to precisely one follow-up email regarding my free trial, rather than an open-ended subscription. Until that's either industry standard or regulated (in a way where individuals can easily recover money damages), then I'm still using disposables at first contact. > More and more companies deny registration from Disposable Email Addresses. Because these users are worthless. Encountering a company like that, I assume they believe the second assertion to be true because the sole value of the users is as advertising eyeballs due to the product trial itself demonstrating no value. In that case, I don't bother. I will, however, usually make at least a modest effort to try a few non-Mailinator disposables. Although Mailinator has alternate domains, they've made themselves very easy to block, because a simple DNS query reveals the MX to be mail.mailinator.com. Just one more level of obfuscation (e.g. making the MX for streetwisemail.com be mail.streetwisemail.com and just have the same IP as mail.mailinator.com) strikes me as a good Pareto-principled step.
- wpietri 8y ago
  > For example, if I'm receiving an advertisement for a product that I "freely" trialed but subsequently rejected, I perceive it as spam. Agreed. I understand that marketing people perceive getting an email address once as permanent consent to basically anything. But I think this is pathological. People who behave like this in any other context are obviously abusive. That even includes some marketing contexts. If you try a free sample at Costco, nobody follows you around the store badgering you until you explicitly tell them to leave you alone.
- gknoy 8y ago
  > ... an advertisement for a product that I "freely" trialed but subsequently rejected, I perceive it as spam. I get lots of email about things I don't want -- vendor spam from AWS conferences, etc. I even call it "spam" when I talk about it. However, it feels _really disingenuous_ to also want it to be classified as spam. Sure, it's unwanted, but _I did sign up for it_. That's pretty much an implicit agreement when you go to a trade show. ("Let us spam you, and get a T-shirt!" "oo, that one has an awesome looking octopus [evident.io], okay!") In almost every case, their service isn't right for me. I'm happy to tell them that at the booth, and explain why I don't feel we need your Enterprise Scale Thingamabob. When I get those emails three months later that I don't want, I don't feel comfortable marking as spam. I'd much prefer to unsubscribe.
philipodonnell 8y ago
> if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. I know where you are coming from, but I don't think I've ever heard it said this way. Do you have any resources that talk about free trials or fremium in these terms? Is the value in that email mostly in the ability to market to the individual behind it, or is the value only in its ability to be sold and/or cross-advertised to? Personally I would say that any user who didn't sign up is "worthless" (given the context you are using here), whether they gave you a disposable email address or not.
tinus_hn 8y ago
> (if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam...) Mail people don’t want to receive is spam. You do not have a right to send anyone anything they don’t want. If your business model depends on that it’s going to fail.

Sir_Substance 8y ago

>if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Sympathetic customer fallacy. Figuring out how to get new paying customers through the door is not the problem of everyone who considers trying your product. Expectations that trial users should "pay" by taking on the burden of having to tell your marketing department to go away if they aren't interested enough to buy it on their own initiative is reality denial. Obviously people aren't going to do that, and spending effort trying to "disposable-email-proof" your trial system is a bottomless pit into which you will pour money for all eternity. People are actually paying money to the disposable email companies to have them actively combat you. You will never complete that project and you will never be able to stop spending on it. Ideally your trial is persuasive enough to have a steady trickle of people decide to buy the full product, but not so generous they feel that they'll get the full experience by cycling disposable email addresses. Finding that balance is the responsibility of your business, no one else will change their behavior to do it for you. If you can't find it, maybe that's a sign that you've made a product that maps poorly to sustaining a business. One might call this the "bittorrent inc" strategic mistake. Always remember to stay grounded in reality.

Drdrdrq 8y ago
This is a fantastic summary, thank you! I use disposeable mails all the time, and any company that refuses to accept them either gets a bogus hotmail account or (more likely) loses a chance to show me what they've built. Otoh, if I want their messages I will leave an address willingly - not my main address of course, but an alias.
matt4077 8y ago
Calling something a “fallacy” is the fallacy fallacy: a mistaken believe in the authority of a made-up concept. In this case, certain norms of conduct in business do exist, and they do often serve all market participants, and businesses have every right, and often succeed, in enforcing them. I’m not sure about the specific example here, as I happen to live in a jurisdiction where it’s illegal to follow up on a trial subscription with endless marketing emails. But, as just one example, cancelling an appointment you can’t kept us not just “sympathetic”. It’s basic manners, it improves life for everyone (including you), and nobody would be surprised that not following the norm could get you banned.
- Sir_Substance 8y ago
  > In this case, certain norms of conduct in business do exist Rejected. You don't get to declare norms by fiat, sorry. >It’s basic manners, it improves life for everyone (including you), and nobody would be surprised that not following the norm could get you banned. Manners are for humans to humans. I don't feel the need to be polite to a trial subscription system. It's a piece of software, it won't feel bad if I don't respond to its mails later on.
wpietri 8y ago
100% agreed. One of the things that I think people have a hard time grasping is that for a lot of software, the marginal cost of a user is approximately zero. People get stuck in a scarcity mindset and get really upset at the notion of freeloaders getting away with something. This is in sharp contrast to the abundance mindset you see in most open-source software. How many people are Linux freeloaders or Mozilla freeloaders or Gnu freeloaders? Hundreds of millions, and once you count devices, maybe billions. But as long as those outfits can pay the bills, they don't care. The funny part to me is that so many people trapped in scarcity thinking only care about getting paid, not paying others. How many of those people trying to capture every dollar of generated value are using open-source tools in what they're selling without giving back? Most of them, I'm sure.

mmt 8y ago

> Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam From a legal standpoint, this is broadly true, but I'd say from a user's perspective, this is only very narrowly true. For example, if I'm receiving an advertisement for a product that I "freely" trialed but subsequently rejected, I perceive it as spam. Reputable companies provide an "unsubscribe" feature that actually works, but it's impossible to determine a priori which companies those are, and, more importantly, if they'll still be that way when that first e-mail arrives. Really, the most trustworthy behavior would be to assume I'm consenting to precisely one follow-up email regarding my free trial, rather than an open-ended subscription. Until that's either industry standard or regulated (in a way where individuals can easily recover money damages), then I'm still using disposables at first contact. > More and more companies deny registration from Disposable Email Addresses. Because these users are worthless. Encountering a company like that, I assume they believe the second assertion to be true because the sole value of the users is as advertising eyeballs due to the product trial itself demonstrating no value. In that case, I don't bother. I will, however, usually make at least a modest effort to try a few non-Mailinator disposables. Although Mailinator has alternate domains, they've made themselves very easy to block, because a simple DNS query reveals the MX to be mail.mailinator.com. Just one more level of obfuscation (e.g. making the MX for streetwisemail.com be mail.streetwisemail.com and just have the same IP as mail.mailinator.com) strikes me as a good Pareto-principled step.

wpietri 8y ago
> For example, if I'm receiving an advertisement for a product that I "freely" trialed but subsequently rejected, I perceive it as spam. Agreed. I understand that marketing people perceive getting an email address once as permanent consent to basically anything. But I think this is pathological. People who behave like this in any other context are obviously abusive. That even includes some marketing contexts. If you try a free sample at Costco, nobody follows you around the store badgering you until you explicitly tell them to leave you alone.
gknoy 8y ago
> ... an advertisement for a product that I "freely" trialed but subsequently rejected, I perceive it as spam. I get lots of email about things I don't want -- vendor spam from AWS conferences, etc. I even call it "spam" when I talk about it. However, it feels _really disingenuous_ to also want it to be classified as spam. Sure, it's unwanted, but _I did sign up for it_. That's pretty much an implicit agreement when you go to a trade show. ("Let us spam you, and get a T-shirt!" "oo, that one has an awesome looking octopus [evident.io], okay!") In almost every case, their service isn't right for me. I'm happy to tell them that at the booth, and explain why I don't feel we need your Enterprise Scale Thingamabob. When I get those emails three months later that I don't want, I don't feel comfortable marking as spam. I'd much prefer to unsubscribe.

philipodonnell 8y ago

> if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. I know where you are coming from, but I don't think I've ever heard it said this way. Do you have any resources that talk about free trials or fremium in these terms? Is the value in that email mostly in the ability to market to the individual behind it, or is the value only in its ability to be sold and/or cross-advertised to? Personally I would say that any user who didn't sign up is "worthless" (given the context you are using here), whether they gave you a disposable email address or not.

tinus_hn 8y ago

> (if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam...) Mail people don’t want to receive is spam. You do not have a right to send anyone anything they don’t want. If your business model depends on that it’s going to fail.