8 ms·

Mostly, it doesn’t even seem to matter whether you agree or not. Inevitably you end up receiving affiliate emails regardless.

dwighttk 4y ago
Yeah my mortgage company sent me a letter saying to opt out of affiliate marketing Emails or snail mail I have to send them a letter requesting it. This was 4 months after they bought my mortgage so the most the letter woulda done is stop them after selling my info for 4 months.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  I had a coworker who sent those letters as a side hustle. He had a few different ones and would send the letters certified mail. Companies are very poor at compliance, and certain violations allow you to sue the company.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    Everything in that except the unspoken end point where I end up with money sounds awful
dspillett 4y ago
This is why every company gets a different address for me. If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already). This sometimes falls foul of spammers adding some random addresses of the form blahblah@mycatchall.domain.tld or <commonname>@mycatchall.domain.tld into their lists, but that hasn't happened often enough to be a problem. That it isn't much of a problem surprises me a little, given how much <commonname>@domain.tld (no sub-domain) addresses are used this way. I have considered trying the pattern somename@<sub-domain-per-company>.domain.tld as an alternative if that becomes a problem, but before implementing that I need to change my email setup (doing that anyway soon as running Zimbra's OSS version is going to get more difficult next year) and maybe my DNS server of choice (if wildcard MX records are an issue, I've not looked into that). Sometimes I get funny looks for addresses like this, especially as I usually work the company/other name in there somewhere. I had one website refuse to accept an address based on their name, which was a rad flag and I backed away from going any further into dealing with that organisation.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  You can just use [id]-[sha1 hmac]@domain.tld The id could be anything, and the SHA1 HMAC takes 32 characters in base32 (which is an email-address-safe encoding). Then just configure your spamfilter to reject any address where the HMAC doesn’t check out. Of course, the drawback is that you’ll need a computer to generate a new address… At which point you may as well store an explicit whitelist of valid addresses.
  - remram 4y ago
    You can do that from a phone app though, or even a static webpage that loads on phones. It doesn't have to be 32 characters either, putting ~4 characters is probably secure enough, unless a ton of people start using this exact scheme. This is a great idea, I might implement it. The difficult part is hooking the validation in the mail server I guess.
- 3dGrabber 4y ago
  > If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already). AND CALL them, if possible: “I’ve received marketing emails from your company recently, how is this possible, I’ve never signed up, yaddayadda… “ Generate some cost on their side.
  - account42 4y ago
    Support calls will probably cost you more than the company unless you value your time very little - most companis don't post numbers answered by anyone paid highly enough for this to have an impact. Instead, call them out publicly or mail/call a someone in a leadership position if you can find contact information.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  I typically do it with <emanynapmoc>@mydomain.tld Spelling the company's name backwards makes it easy to match to a company for use by my own spam filter without setting off their pattern detectors.
- 4y ago

dwighttk 4y ago

Yeah my mortgage company sent me a letter saying to opt out of affiliate marketing Emails or snail mail I have to send them a letter requesting it. This was 4 months after they bought my mortgage so the most the letter woulda done is stop them after selling my info for 4 months.

Spooky23 4y ago
I had a coworker who sent those letters as a side hustle. He had a few different ones and would send the letters certified mail. Companies are very poor at compliance, and certain violations allow you to sue the company.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  Everything in that except the unspoken end point where I end up with money sounds awful

dspillett 4y ago

This is why every company gets a different address for me. If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already). This sometimes falls foul of spammers adding some random addresses of the form blahblah@mycatchall.domain.tld or <commonname>@mycatchall.domain.tld into their lists, but that hasn't happened often enough to be a problem. That it isn't much of a problem surprises me a little, given how much <commonname>@domain.tld (no sub-domain) addresses are used this way. I have considered trying the pattern somename@<sub-domain-per-company>.domain.tld as an alternative if that becomes a problem, but before implementing that I need to change my email setup (doing that anyway soon as running Zimbra's OSS version is going to get more difficult next year) and maybe my DNS server of choice (if wildcard MX records are an issue, I've not looked into that). Sometimes I get funny looks for addresses like this, especially as I usually work the company/other name in there somewhere. I had one website refuse to accept an address based on their name, which was a rad flag and I backed away from going any further into dealing with that organisation.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
You can just use [id]-[sha1 hmac]@domain.tld The id could be anything, and the SHA1 HMAC takes 32 characters in base32 (which is an email-address-safe encoding). Then just configure your spamfilter to reject any address where the HMAC doesn’t check out. Of course, the drawback is that you’ll need a computer to generate a new address… At which point you may as well store an explicit whitelist of valid addresses.
- remram 4y ago
  You can do that from a phone app though, or even a static webpage that loads on phones. It doesn't have to be 32 characters either, putting ~4 characters is probably secure enough, unless a ton of people start using this exact scheme. This is a great idea, I might implement it. The difficult part is hooking the validation in the mail server I guess.
3dGrabber 4y ago
> If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already). AND CALL them, if possible: “I’ve received marketing emails from your company recently, how is this possible, I’ve never signed up, yaddayadda… “ Generate some cost on their side.
- account42 4y ago
  Support calls will probably cost you more than the company unless you value your time very little - most companis don't post numbers answered by anyone paid highly enough for this to have an impact. Instead, call them out publicly or mail/call a someone in a leadership position if you can find contact information.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
I typically do it with <emanynapmoc>@mydomain.tld Spelling the company's name backwards makes it easy to match to a company for use by my own spam filter without setting off their pattern detectors.
4y ago