5 ms·

When I get subscribed to any mailing list I didn't explicitly opt-in to I just mark them as spam (which it is) on GMail and move on. Enough of us doing this an

by kaoD 6y ago

When I get subscribed to any mailing list I didn't explicitly opt-in to I just mark them as spam (which it is) on GMail and move on. Enough of us doing this and I guess they'll get the message.

coronadisaster 6y ago
Can't you pay Google to let your spam/ads through?
- sethammons 6y ago
  I would doubt this. I work for a large email service provider and we do lots of work to fight spam on our system. We also do lots of work with the Gmail folks (at least, we have in the past -- pretty sure we were the first ESP to use delivery feedback loops with them). We were never offered a "pay to play" thing. Instead, it was just them doing their best to fight spam and us doing our best to fight spam.
kerkeslager 6y ago
That doesn't work and it really can't work. If you order from foo.com, you want to receive the receipt, but you don't want to receive "Top ten deals of the summer from foo.com". But these come from the same email address, from the same server, etc. Maybe AI filtering will get good enough to deal with this stuff reliably in the future, but right now, it seems like we're stuck with it. The reality here is that the free market rewards this awful behavior, so it won't be solved until regulation is applied.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  It's particularly annoying because the spammers are not only causing trouble in their own right but also motivating an overreaction from major mail services in response. From the sending side, I have one business right now where our outgoing emails are apparently being blocked or even silently dropped by at least three ISPs spread across two different continents. We have never sent anything even remotely spammy in our entire trading history. We have all the usual shouldn't-be-needed-but-are extras like SPF properly configured. The sending mail server hasn't found its way onto any of the big blacklists as far as we can tell. And the mails being blocked are actually quite important things like password reset requests, emails with copies of documentation that we are legally required to send attached, or even replies to customers contacting us to ask where their password reset emails are when they've been requesting them! From the receiving side, I'm fed up with helping friends and family who are trying to work out why they aren't getting important messages, and with the ISPs who have screwed up their mail configuration or deliberately set up overly aggressive anti-spam policies but then have front-line support drones who just intone that you should check your junk mail folder as an instinctive reaction to any complaint about missing mail. I think that with email now effectively being both the effective root password to so many online accounts and the primary means of communication between a lot of people and organisations with genuine reasons to contact them, the medium of email needs the same kinds of legal safeguards that other essential means of communications like postal mail have enjoyed for a long time. I don't think it should be left to big name mail services or some random ISP to decide whether or not their users are going to receive legitimate emails any more. Blocking false positives is far more damaging than missing false negatives when it comes to spam, and the situation is out of control. It's time to regulate.
axismundi 6y ago
I don't think this is a good idea, for two reasons: They push the responsibility of getting rid of unwanted stuff in our mailboxes to us. It's not a single company doing this, but most of them. That's sometimes dozens of emails a week! We shouldn't waste our time reading, parsing and fighting the unsubscribe forms - many times fortified with cookie-consent walls! The average internet user will not do that anyway, so the spammers rely on user's laziness and dulled senses, just like ad blindness, so they slowly start to accept this sick situation as the new normal. For us it becomes the new normal. For our children - the only normal.

by kaoD 6y ago

When I get subscribed to any mailing list I didn't explicitly opt-in to I just mark them as spam (which it is) on GMail and move on. Enough of us doing this and I guess they'll get the message.

coronadisaster 6y ago

Can't you pay Google to let your spam/ads through?

sethammons 6y ago
I would doubt this. I work for a large email service provider and we do lots of work to fight spam on our system. We also do lots of work with the Gmail folks (at least, we have in the past -- pretty sure we were the first ESP to use delivery feedback loops with them). We were never offered a "pay to play" thing. Instead, it was just them doing their best to fight spam and us doing our best to fight spam.

kerkeslager 6y ago

That doesn't work and it really can't work. If you order from foo.com, you want to receive the receipt, but you don't want to receive "Top ten deals of the summer from foo.com". But these come from the same email address, from the same server, etc. Maybe AI filtering will get good enough to deal with this stuff reliably in the future, but right now, it seems like we're stuck with it. The reality here is that the free market rewards this awful behavior, so it won't be solved until regulation is applied.

Silhouette 6y ago
It's particularly annoying because the spammers are not only causing trouble in their own right but also motivating an overreaction from major mail services in response. From the sending side, I have one business right now where our outgoing emails are apparently being blocked or even silently dropped by at least three ISPs spread across two different continents. We have never sent anything even remotely spammy in our entire trading history. We have all the usual shouldn't-be-needed-but-are extras like SPF properly configured. The sending mail server hasn't found its way onto any of the big blacklists as far as we can tell. And the mails being blocked are actually quite important things like password reset requests, emails with copies of documentation that we are legally required to send attached, or even replies to customers contacting us to ask where their password reset emails are when they've been requesting them! From the receiving side, I'm fed up with helping friends and family who are trying to work out why they aren't getting important messages, and with the ISPs who have screwed up their mail configuration or deliberately set up overly aggressive anti-spam policies but then have front-line support drones who just intone that you should check your junk mail folder as an instinctive reaction to any complaint about missing mail. I think that with email now effectively being both the effective root password to so many online accounts and the primary means of communication between a lot of people and organisations with genuine reasons to contact them, the medium of email needs the same kinds of legal safeguards that other essential means of communications like postal mail have enjoyed for a long time. I don't think it should be left to big name mail services or some random ISP to decide whether or not their users are going to receive legitimate emails any more. Blocking false positives is far more damaging than missing false negatives when it comes to spam, and the situation is out of control. It's time to regulate.

axismundi 6y ago

I don't think this is a good idea, for two reasons: They push the responsibility of getting rid of unwanted stuff in our mailboxes to us. It's not a single company doing this, but most of them. That's sometimes dozens of emails a week! We shouldn't waste our time reading, parsing and fighting the unsubscribe forms - many times fortified with cookie-consent walls! The average internet user will not do that anyway, so the spammers rely on user's laziness and dulled senses, just like ad blindness, so they slowly start to accept this sick situation as the new normal. For us it becomes the new normal. For our children - the only normal.