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I run https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com - People will visit my site, enter their email address, receive an email from me, cl

I run https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com - People will visit my site, enter their email address, receive an email from me, click the "confirm" link in that email, then once confirmed that they control the email address, go to another section of the website and send themselves a test email. Then they will go into their email client and click the spam button on both of the emails that I sent them. The confirmation email, and also the test email. Even though they requested these emails. Even though both emails have an unsubscribe header and link which takes them to a place where they can opt-out in perpetuity from receiving any further email from me. I know this, because I get feedback loop emails when people do it. This happens regularly.

wruza 6y ago
They do that because they have no guarantee that a site will respect an “unsubscribe” request, and it wouldn’t drag them through a shady multi-step “but why” dialog, and it wouldn’t send them another email with “Dear sucker, we see your request and sadly have to react, but you know how these servers work, right? Wait for a week or twelve before all our systems are aware that you wanted to unsubscribe from one of our many non-enumerable spam channels. And if they don’t, feel free to repeat, best regards”. Fair players like you are so rare these days, and to them you are yet another nobody who gets rich on ads and spam.
- mike-cardwell 6y ago
  I think you're missing the point. They opted in to receiving my email. They handed over their email address to me and requested that I send them an email. They then told their email provider that the email they requested was spam. I've considered putting up a page with a list of these peoples email addresses, but I feel like it would end up causing me more problems than it's worth. [edit] There should be a system where I can prove to an email provider that I was in fact given permission to send to an address (for a period of time, and/or for a specific quantity of messages). If there was a standard email header where you could stick a callback URL like: Request-Permission: url=https://www.example.com/callback period=1D count=10 Then when e.g Google receives this message, they could have some sort of UI to say "The sender of this email wants permission to send you up to 10 emails for the next 24 hours". The user when then click yes or no. If yes, Google would fire off a request to my callback URL, so both me and Google knows I have permission. Google could then skip/reduce spam filtering for those emails then too.
  - wruza 6y ago
    They opted in to receiving my email. They handed over their email address to me and requested that I send them an email. Yes. It’s clear that you have no intention to reach them afterwards. But to them it is not so clear, and they mark these innocent letters as spam preventively, out of habit, cause other sites committed abuse in the past and they don’t want to test yet another service’s good nature. Much easier to ban you forever and forget about that, even before you did something unexpected. I know it’s unfair, and I don’t act like that, but they can and some of them do. No time on their hands to differentiate. Modern email culture is rotten to the core and popular email services only cultivate that.
  - hedora 6y ago
    Maybe a “click here to receive future emails” button in gmail that basically added your sending address to their spam filter allow list, and sent you a feedback loop email. Once pressed, it would replace the “spam” UI element with “unsubscribe”.

wruza 6y ago

They do that because they have no guarantee that a site will respect an “unsubscribe” request, and it wouldn’t drag them through a shady multi-step “but why” dialog, and it wouldn’t send them another email with “Dear sucker, we see your request and sadly have to react, but you know how these servers work, right? Wait for a week or twelve before all our systems are aware that you wanted to unsubscribe from one of our many non-enumerable spam channels. And if they don’t, feel free to repeat, best regards”. Fair players like you are so rare these days, and to them you are yet another nobody who gets rich on ads and spam.

mike-cardwell 6y ago
I think you're missing the point. They opted in to receiving my email. They handed over their email address to me and requested that I send them an email. They then told their email provider that the email they requested was spam. I've considered putting up a page with a list of these peoples email addresses, but I feel like it would end up causing me more problems than it's worth. [edit] There should be a system where I can prove to an email provider that I was in fact given permission to send to an address (for a period of time, and/or for a specific quantity of messages). If there was a standard email header where you could stick a callback URL like: Request-Permission: url=https://www.example.com/callback period=1D count=10 Then when e.g Google receives this message, they could have some sort of UI to say "The sender of this email wants permission to send you up to 10 emails for the next 24 hours". The user when then click yes or no. If yes, Google would fire off a request to my callback URL, so both me and Google knows I have permission. Google could then skip/reduce spam filtering for those emails then too.
- wruza 6y ago
  They opted in to receiving my email. They handed over their email address to me and requested that I send them an email. Yes. It’s clear that you have no intention to reach them afterwards. But to them it is not so clear, and they mark these innocent letters as spam preventively, out of habit, cause other sites committed abuse in the past and they don’t want to test yet another service’s good nature. Much easier to ban you forever and forget about that, even before you did something unexpected. I know it’s unfair, and I don’t act like that, but they can and some of them do. No time on their hands to differentiate. Modern email culture is rotten to the core and popular email services only cultivate that.
- hedora 6y ago
  Maybe a “click here to receive future emails” button in gmail that basically added your sending address to their spam filter allow list, and sent you a feedback loop email. Once pressed, it would replace the “spam” UI element with “unsubscribe”.