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Whenever I order something online, I always uncheck the box that says "I want to receive your newsletter" or never check it the first place. Inevitably, in the

Whenever I order something online, I always uncheck the box that says "I want to receive your newsletter" or never check it the first place. Inevitably, in the next few days, I start to receive their product offerings

low_tech_love 5y ago
Guess what happens when you click "unsubscribe"?
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  I don't receive any emails for about 6-12 months, and then I start receiving emails again. At least that's what has happened with NextDoor, twice - once each for different emails months/years apart. NextDoor also used to violate the CanSpam Act by requring you to log in to unsubscribe, but they fixed that a couple of years ago.
  - anderspitman 5y ago
    I just learned how bad NextDoor's dark patterns are yesterday. I realized it was about the 4th time I'd tried to unsubscribe, navigated to the notifications page, and see that they have about 40 categories of emails they send you, split across several parent categories. You could turn off parent categories, but not silence everything at once.
  - vidanay 5y ago
    My nearest neighbor is more than a quarter mile away. In a two-mile radius, I have less than a dozen "neighbors", and yet somehow, I have a NextDoor account that I receive spam emails about.
    - MerelyMortal 5y ago
      Do the content previews in the emails look like they're for your area, or could it be someone with a similar name registered somewhere else with the wrong email address and NextDoor never validated the email address? I hate it when companies allow people to signup with email addresses that aren't theirs, never validate the email address, and then start spamming me. I mark all of those as spam. The latest offender is Chime.com (I have a common-ish FirstLast@gmail that I'm phasing away from.)
      - vidanay 5y ago
        It's definitely the correct geographical location.
        MerelyMortal 5y ago
        Despite me unsubscribing two days ago, I just received another email from NextDoor. *marks as spam*
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        I have a lastfirst@gmail and the fellow owning firstlast@gmail has occasionally used my email address by accident.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Fun fact about CAN-SPAM: your recourse is supposed to be reporting them to your ISP. Except that Comcast/Xfinity itself is violating the CAN-SPAM act. I constantly get product offers and other junk from them, despite being clearly marked as "unsubscribed from all" when I click the unsubscribe link. They are also a local monopoly and I have no affordable alternative for "basic broadband". There does not seem to be any facility to report this to any regulatory agency of the US government or my state government.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Your email gets added to known good addresses list and sold around?
  - starwind 5y ago
    I at least haven't seem to have had that experience with legitimate companies. Spam, yeah, I don't even load images to those emails
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  You get a ridiculous page that makes it as confusing as possible to actually unsubscribe from everything. Once you succeed at that, you stop getting emails from them until they roll out their next marketing campaign, which you couldn't unsubscribe from because it didn't exist yet.
- bennyp101 5y ago
  A lot of the time it goes via a link that gets blocked by ABP, or my pi-hole - so I just give up and route it to junk
dspillett 5y ago
This is why I have a catch-all and give each company a different address. I can just forward that address to junk¹ instead of bothering to unsubscribe. It isn't just when they ignore their own consent options for sending their own stuff, often mailing lists are hacked out of companies and become junk targets that way. Or they are actively sold: the amount of crap I get to the addresses I have registered with kickstarter²³, paypal, etc., seems to confirm that is very common. [1] Or set it to bounce, but I prefer /dev/null as bouncing increases the chance I'm becoming part of a back-scatter issue. [2] At some point soon I'll get around to cycling those addresses to something else again, I haven't for a while, then the current ones will be redirected to spam training. [3] Including some newsletters specifically targetting people who have interacted with crowd-funding so some project's team has given my address out against my wishes⁴. I wish we could give them specific addresses when supporting, so I could tell who (I don't cycle the main address I use for such things often enough to tell). [4] Though those have saved me money: if I think of supporting a project I search the junk file first and if it has been mentioned by “backer-update”, “grant @ t.k.p.”, “kickstartech”, etc, I'll walk away - but only one has lost my help thus far that way and doubt anyone else is doing it so this petty little victory probably means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > bouncing increases the chance I'm becoming part of a back-scatter issue Bouncing doesn't cause backscatter, provided it's a real bounce; that means a bounce that is a rejection by your mailserver, performed during the SMTP transaction. The message commonly known as a "bounce message" is technically known as a delivery status notification. The actual bounce message is composed by the sender's mailserver, and can't cause backscatter. Basically, a bounce sent after the SMTP server has said "Message accepted for delivery" is a bogus bounce, and causes backscatter. Sending bogus bounces is a reprehensible practice (and quite useless).
  - dspillett 5y ago
    Aye. It sometimes happens because mail gets accepted then put into a local queue for processing (anti-spam checks and other scans) and the fake bounce sent after that. A badly designed system (and such do exist) will do this even for messages they could immediately reject based on the invalid incoming address. It can also happen because there is an intermediate SMTP server between the sender and receiver, the intermediate has dropped the connection to the sender before the final destination rejects, so if you want to bounce at all it has to be a fake bounce. I don't know without checking (and I've been too lazy to test!) if my mail services properly bounce based on target address or fake bounce, so I err on the side of not causing disruption if it is the bad one. I'll be replacing Zimbra with something else (probably self-built from standard parts as my needs are much more limited than when I picked Zimbra many years ago, just mail, nothing else) for my main mail service soon, this will be one of the things to make sure I get right.

low_tech_love 5y ago

Guess what happens when you click "unsubscribe"?

MerelyMortal 5y ago
I don't receive any emails for about 6-12 months, and then I start receiving emails again. At least that's what has happened with NextDoor, twice - once each for different emails months/years apart. NextDoor also used to violate the CanSpam Act by requring you to log in to unsubscribe, but they fixed that a couple of years ago.
- anderspitman 5y ago
  I just learned how bad NextDoor's dark patterns are yesterday. I realized it was about the 4th time I'd tried to unsubscribe, navigated to the notifications page, and see that they have about 40 categories of emails they send you, split across several parent categories. You could turn off parent categories, but not silence everything at once.
- vidanay 5y ago
  My nearest neighbor is more than a quarter mile away. In a two-mile radius, I have less than a dozen "neighbors", and yet somehow, I have a NextDoor account that I receive spam emails about.
  - MerelyMortal 5y ago
    Do the content previews in the emails look like they're for your area, or could it be someone with a similar name registered somewhere else with the wrong email address and NextDoor never validated the email address? I hate it when companies allow people to signup with email addresses that aren't theirs, never validate the email address, and then start spamming me. I mark all of those as spam. The latest offender is Chime.com (I have a common-ish FirstLast@gmail that I'm phasing away from.)
    - vidanay 5y ago
      It's definitely the correct geographical location.
      - MerelyMortal 5y ago
        Despite me unsubscribing two days ago, I just received another email from NextDoor. *marks as spam*
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      I have a lastfirst@gmail and the fellow owning firstlast@gmail has occasionally used my email address by accident.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Fun fact about CAN-SPAM: your recourse is supposed to be reporting them to your ISP. Except that Comcast/Xfinity itself is violating the CAN-SPAM act. I constantly get product offers and other junk from them, despite being clearly marked as "unsubscribed from all" when I click the unsubscribe link. They are also a local monopoly and I have no affordable alternative for "basic broadband". There does not seem to be any facility to report this to any regulatory agency of the US government or my state government.
Ekaros 5y ago
Your email gets added to known good addresses list and sold around?
- starwind 5y ago
  I at least haven't seem to have had that experience with legitimate companies. Spam, yeah, I don't even load images to those emails
plorkyeran 5y ago
You get a ridiculous page that makes it as confusing as possible to actually unsubscribe from everything. Once you succeed at that, you stop getting emails from them until they roll out their next marketing campaign, which you couldn't unsubscribe from because it didn't exist yet.
bennyp101 5y ago
A lot of the time it goes via a link that gets blocked by ABP, or my pi-hole - so I just give up and route it to junk

dspillett 5y ago

This is why I have a catch-all and give each company a different address. I can just forward that address to junk¹ instead of bothering to unsubscribe. It isn't just when they ignore their own consent options for sending their own stuff, often mailing lists are hacked out of companies and become junk targets that way. Or they are actively sold: the amount of crap I get to the addresses I have registered with kickstarter²³, paypal, etc., seems to confirm that is very common. [1] Or set it to bounce, but I prefer /dev/null as bouncing increases the chance I'm becoming part of a back-scatter issue. [2] At some point soon I'll get around to cycling those addresses to something else again, I haven't for a while, then the current ones will be redirected to spam training. [3] Including some newsletters specifically targetting people who have interacted with crowd-funding so some project's team has given my address out against my wishes⁴. I wish we could give them specific addresses when supporting, so I could tell who (I don't cycle the main address I use for such things often enough to tell). [4] Though those have saved me money: if I think of supporting a project I search the junk file first and if it has been mentioned by “backer-update”, “grant @ t.k.p.”, “kickstartech”, etc, I'll walk away - but only one has lost my help thus far that way and doubt anyone else is doing it so this petty little victory probably means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> bouncing increases the chance I'm becoming part of a back-scatter issue Bouncing doesn't cause backscatter, provided it's a real bounce; that means a bounce that is a rejection by your mailserver, performed during the SMTP transaction. The message commonly known as a "bounce message" is technically known as a delivery status notification. The actual bounce message is composed by the sender's mailserver, and can't cause backscatter. Basically, a bounce sent after the SMTP server has said "Message accepted for delivery" is a bogus bounce, and causes backscatter. Sending bogus bounces is a reprehensible practice (and quite useless).
- dspillett 5y ago
  Aye. It sometimes happens because mail gets accepted then put into a local queue for processing (anti-spam checks and other scans) and the fake bounce sent after that. A badly designed system (and such do exist) will do this even for messages they could immediately reject based on the invalid incoming address. It can also happen because there is an intermediate SMTP server between the sender and receiver, the intermediate has dropped the connection to the sender before the final destination rejects, so if you want to bounce at all it has to be a fake bounce. I don't know without checking (and I've been too lazy to test!) if my mail services properly bounce based on target address or fake bounce, so I err on the side of not causing disruption if it is the bad one. I'll be replacing Zimbra with something else (probably self-built from standard parts as my needs are much more limited than when I picked Zimbra many years ago, just mail, nothing else) for my main mail service soon, this will be one of the things to make sure I get right.