5 ms·

> 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 ve

by 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.
- mmt 8y ago
  The trade show situation, however, is entirely different, however, because the whole thing is purely about marketing. There's no trial product whose real value could be substituted for that marketing. That said, I'm having trouble with this seeming contradiction: > Sure, it's unwanted, but _I did sign up for it_. Maybe "want" is too strong a word, but you certainly knew you were willing to tolerate it when you did sign up for it. Conversely, when I'm at a trade show, because I find those emails truly unwanted (and actually intolerable from vendors in whom I have no interest), if I've registered with a real e-mail address, I don't share it just for the octopus t-shirt.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Just mark it as spam. If they aren't spamming the internet at large, they won't get blocked at large, and your local bayesian filters will block them from you.
  - mmt 8y ago
    I don't think that works that way with giant services like Gmail. I routinely see marketing e-mail that I want to see erroneously auto-sent to Spam by Gmail. Since this has even happened for infrequent explicit-opt-in lists, I have to conclude there's no such thing as a "local" filter there.
    - mcbits 8y ago
      It seems Gmail does globally filter some campaigns if enough users (or enough of the right users) mark them as spam, but that doesn't mean they don't also have local account-level spam filters. A way to test it would be to mark Amazon or LinkedIn's spam as spam and see if Gmail starts automatically filtering it for that account. They definitely don't filter it globally.
      - mmt 8y ago
        Even the success of such an experiment as you describe (which I believe I've previously run, unsucessfully, i.e. it took more than one mark-as-spam of a popular, otherwise-legit sender to get it reliably in my Spam folder) wouldn't convince me that there exist any such local, per-account or even per-domain (unless I'm paying for the Postini service) filters. It would merely be evidence that there's a datum of "spam: From:LinkedIn To:mmt" going into the global filter database and that matching both From and To is sufficiently strong evidence to that global filter.
mmirate 8y ago
> From a legal standpoint, this is broadly true, but I'd say from a user's perspective, this is only very narrowly true. Oh, please. Of the two, the former is the only one that really matters here.

by mmt 8y ago

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.

mmt 8y ago
The trade show situation, however, is entirely different, however, because the whole thing is purely about marketing. There's no trial product whose real value could be substituted for that marketing. That said, I'm having trouble with this seeming contradiction: > Sure, it's unwanted, but _I did sign up for it_. Maybe "want" is too strong a word, but you certainly knew you were willing to tolerate it when you did sign up for it. Conversely, when I'm at a trade show, because I find those emails truly unwanted (and actually intolerable from vendors in whom I have no interest), if I've registered with a real e-mail address, I don't share it just for the octopus t-shirt.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
Just mark it as spam. If they aren't spamming the internet at large, they won't get blocked at large, and your local bayesian filters will block them from you.
- mmt 8y ago
  I don't think that works that way with giant services like Gmail. I routinely see marketing e-mail that I want to see erroneously auto-sent to Spam by Gmail. Since this has even happened for infrequent explicit-opt-in lists, I have to conclude there's no such thing as a "local" filter there.
  - mcbits 8y ago
    It seems Gmail does globally filter some campaigns if enough users (or enough of the right users) mark them as spam, but that doesn't mean they don't also have local account-level spam filters. A way to test it would be to mark Amazon or LinkedIn's spam as spam and see if Gmail starts automatically filtering it for that account. They definitely don't filter it globally.
    - mmt 8y ago
      Even the success of such an experiment as you describe (which I believe I've previously run, unsucessfully, i.e. it took more than one mark-as-spam of a popular, otherwise-legit sender to get it reliably in my Spam folder) wouldn't convince me that there exist any such local, per-account or even per-domain (unless I'm paying for the Postini service) filters. It would merely be evidence that there's a datum of "spam: From:LinkedIn To:mmt" going into the global filter database and that matching both From and To is sufficiently strong evidence to that global filter.

mmirate 8y ago

> From a legal standpoint, this is broadly true, but I'd say from a user's perspective, this is only very narrowly true. Oh, please. Of the two, the former is the only one that really matters here.