5 ms·

> It also heavily penalizes people who legitimately need to send bulk email. Aka spammers.

by Nullabillity 7y ago

dasil003 7y ago
Believe it or not there are email newsletters and mailing lists that people legitimately want to receive.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Such as the Linux kernel mailing list.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Yeah, but for bulk-mail one could introduce "whitelists".
zbentley 7y ago
(Note: deleted and moved here because I put it in reply to the wrong comment) I work for an email marketing provider (opinions my own, obviously), and I was extremely surprised how many people genuinely want to receive lots of commercial bulk marketing email. And by "want to" I don't mean "don't mark as spam", I mean "continually sign up for different marketing newsletters, and consistently use links in newsletters/marketing emails to make purchases from multiple companies". It's an alien phenomenon to me, and it may be a minority of bulk email, but it definitely is useful to a lot of people. Maybe it's their equivalent of coupon-clipping-based shopping, or maybe they just like learning about things to buy in that format? I have no idea. That aside, the last thing an email marketing platform wants to do is send spam. Every time someone marks an email such a provider sends as spam, the reputation of their sending addresses is damaged, and therefore their ability to deliver mail to aforementioned people who want to receive them (and therefore the ability of the marketing platform to make money by facilitating that kind of desired email) is jeopardized. TL;dr there's bulk marketing email and then there's spam, and surprisingly little overlap (and overlapping incentives) between the people who send each.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  Sure, I do this. A lot of stuff people buy is often a lot cheaper with promotions. Just the other day, I bought a $600 set of tires for $300-380 (depending on whether or not I remember to do the mail in rebate). That alone is well worth the few clicks it took to filter mails from that list out of my inbox and into a label for car-related marketing. I have a couple of broad categories for these filters like car stuff, computer stuff, other-hobby-related-stuff and of course clothing, and just take a look at the appropriate one when I need or want something. Takes virtually no time, and saves a lot of money. Of course I'm not gonna lie, I do end up buying things that I wouldn't have bought otherwise by doing this. But some of those things are pretty cool, too. :) I do have a few more cheap ARM boards of various types than I can probably use, though.
hakfoo 7y ago
One of the big corner cases I've noticed is transaction-oriented email-- the password resets, "welcome to your account" emails, order details, shipping notifications. People want these, but they're probably harder to deliver than personal email or much spammier bulk mail sent directly via outsourced experts. These have a lot of iffy issues. * Since they're going to be generated by the ecommerce service, it may not be running on the same server or IP block as your main mail infrastructure, so you might have to specially configure around that. * The content-- hundreds of messages a day, at seemingly scattershot recipients and highly templated-- screams spammy nto the wrong algorithm. Yeah, there's services like Mandrill, but the whole ecosystem feels broken. It's not serving mailers. It's not serving the recipients very well. It seems designed to please a small, delicate, vocal audience. The people so upset at the prospect of false negatives (spam in the inbox) that they rally around providers who are prone to aggressive false positives. Who are these people and what makes them tick? I could see this backlash in a situation where it's high risk or cost, but users can manage their own filters in any half-decent mail system, and frankly, clicking through a few pieces of spam a week is not a big deal-- arguably far less a hassle than spending an hour on the phone to get a tracking number that a spam filer ate.

> It also heavily penalizes people who legitimately need to send bulk email. Aka spammers.

dasil003 7y ago

Believe it or not there are email newsletters and mailing lists that people legitimately want to receive.

jcranmer 7y ago
Such as the Linux kernel mailing list.
- amelius 7y ago
  Yeah, but for bulk-mail one could introduce "whitelists".

zbentley 7y ago

(Note: deleted and moved here because I put it in reply to the wrong comment) I work for an email marketing provider (opinions my own, obviously), and I was extremely surprised how many people genuinely want to receive lots of commercial bulk marketing email. And by "want to" I don't mean "don't mark as spam", I mean "continually sign up for different marketing newsletters, and consistently use links in newsletters/marketing emails to make purchases from multiple companies". It's an alien phenomenon to me, and it may be a minority of bulk email, but it definitely is useful to a lot of people. Maybe it's their equivalent of coupon-clipping-based shopping, or maybe they just like learning about things to buy in that format? I have no idea. That aside, the last thing an email marketing platform wants to do is send spam. Every time someone marks an email such a provider sends as spam, the reputation of their sending addresses is damaged, and therefore their ability to deliver mail to aforementioned people who want to receive them (and therefore the ability of the marketing platform to make money by facilitating that kind of desired email) is jeopardized. TL;dr there's bulk marketing email and then there's spam, and surprisingly little overlap (and overlapping incentives) between the people who send each.

boring_twenties 7y ago
Sure, I do this. A lot of stuff people buy is often a lot cheaper with promotions. Just the other day, I bought a $600 set of tires for $300-380 (depending on whether or not I remember to do the mail in rebate). That alone is well worth the few clicks it took to filter mails from that list out of my inbox and into a label for car-related marketing. I have a couple of broad categories for these filters like car stuff, computer stuff, other-hobby-related-stuff and of course clothing, and just take a look at the appropriate one when I need or want something. Takes virtually no time, and saves a lot of money. Of course I'm not gonna lie, I do end up buying things that I wouldn't have bought otherwise by doing this. But some of those things are pretty cool, too. :) I do have a few more cheap ARM boards of various types than I can probably use, though.

hakfoo 7y ago

One of the big corner cases I've noticed is transaction-oriented email-- the password resets, "welcome to your account" emails, order details, shipping notifications. People want these, but they're probably harder to deliver than personal email or much spammier bulk mail sent directly via outsourced experts. These have a lot of iffy issues. * Since they're going to be generated by the ecommerce service, it may not be running on the same server or IP block as your main mail infrastructure, so you might have to specially configure around that. * The content-- hundreds of messages a day, at seemingly scattershot recipients and highly templated-- screams spammy nto the wrong algorithm. Yeah, there's services like Mandrill, but the whole ecosystem feels broken. It's not serving mailers. It's not serving the recipients very well. It seems designed to please a small, delicate, vocal audience. The people so upset at the prospect of false negatives (spam in the inbox) that they rally around providers who are prone to aggressive false positives. Who are these people and what makes them tick? I could see this backlash in a situation where it's high risk or cost, but users can manage their own filters in any half-decent mail system, and frankly, clicking through a few pieces of spam a week is not a big deal-- arguably far less a hassle than spending an hour on the phone to get a tracking number that a spam filer ate.