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Email had similarly wide-open protocols to phone systems so it can be interesting to ask how spam was tackled. One thing with email is that big webmail provider
by dan-robertson 5y ago
Email had similarly wide-open protocols to phone systems so it can be interesting to ask how spam was tackled. One thing with email is that big webmail providers got to be gatekeepers so could e.g.
- require signatures/other things to prove which hostname the email came from
- do wide-scale analysis of senders/email contents to filter out spam
There are still issues (eg people typically will be more mad if they see spam emails than if unexpected legitimate emails get marked as spam because they won’t know if the latter is happening unless they frequently check their spam folder), and the popularity of some webmail systems means that it can be hard to tick all the boxes to not have your own legitimate emails binned. Similarly the ‘marked as spam’ signal is very strong so if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’.
It seems the phone system is still at the stage where they don’t know who phone calls are actually coming from (except somehow they manage to bill these people).
- ghaff 5y ago>if you send out a newsletter that people mostly read and want and can easily unsubscribe to, you can still end up being sent to spam for all users because some people use ‘mark as spam’ to mean ‘please unsubscribe me from this newsletter’. My Gmail SPAM folder is filled with a ton of stuff that isn't really spam. There are newsletters I probably signed up for at some point or at least downloaded a document/watched a webinar where getting periodic emails was part of the deal. Because, yes, rather than clicking the unsubscribe button which legitimate marketers will honor, a lot of people just hit report spam which at some point puts it into the spam bucket for everyone.
- eloisius 5y agoOne of those people is me. I don’t take the time to determine whether it’s ‘legitimate marketing.’ I would never ever sign up for a marketing email, even if I am a customer of the company that sends them. Until companies stop dumping every single email address the get their hands on into their marketing list I will continue to mark every one of them as spam. I even use rules to flag emails including the word ‘unsubscribe’ so I can do it more easily.
- istillwritecode 5y agoMe too. For me there is no such thing as "legitimate marketing". It's unsolicited commercial email, which means it is spam.
- istillwritecode 5y agoThe reason why some people use the spam signal to unsubscribe is because most of these email lists were not _explicitly_ requested by the people. Not only that but unsubscribe confirms the existence of an email address. I'm hoping that the machine learning approach to spam completely collapses so that we're forced to do something more effective.