3 ms·

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly

by dijit 4y ago

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super easy to unsubscribe, emailed once a month at most; and we had people still marking our communications as spam. I'm not sure what else we could have done to weed out the people who just smack the spam button honestly. That said, there was a lot of variance, emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months. I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button.

supertrope 4y ago
I assume you have transactional and marketing emails coming from separate email addresses. If the email ecosystem made it easier for bulk senders, this would just shift the burden onto recipients. Right now the common enemy of illegal spammers externalize the costs of their business onto email providers and users. For every dollar they take they impose 100x that in spam filtering costs. >99.9% of raw email traffic is spam. Blame spammers who offer fake unsubscribe links. Or companies who violate CAN-SPAM by requiring login to unsubscribe instead of one click opt-out. Marking as spam always works.
rationalist 4y ago
How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that business I never had any business with starts spamming me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask for permission. Unfortunately I have a few technology-challenged acquaintances still using my common-ish firslast@ gmail, but once I get them switched over, everything that inbox receives will automatically be marked as spam.
- dijit 4y ago
  > How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? Double opt-in. You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used to send you an email with a link to click to complete the process. For transactional email this would be handled by getting people to either create an account or use Paypal for guest checkout. (this was 2012)
ChainOfFools 4y ago
People who mark things as junk mail or spam typically have no idea that this action can have an upstream impact on spam filtering algorithms. They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works and just assume that the purpose of marking something is spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it, personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that their preference thus exerts a small influence over the experience of potentially millions of other people. In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users, the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the spam button. But today that definition is something closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I am fairly certain few if any other people are interested in seeing, either."
- hurril 4y ago
  Oh we do. We just don't want to have your shitty newsletter.
- the_af 4y ago
  I disagree with your modern definition. Spam to me is unsolicited commercial emails. All email "ads" are spam. Newsletters I didn't subscribe to are spam. Anything trying to sell me something I didn't subscribe to is spam. You bet I'm going to mark it as spam and I hope it creates trouble for the sender. PS: I assume we all agree scams, "Russian singles", chain letters, "little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer", etc, are all spam. That's a shared common ground.
  - Breza 4y ago
    I agree with you. Outlook gives me the option to classify an email as either spam or phishing. Newsletter I didn't ask to receive? Spam. Newsletter I signed up for but am tired of getting? Unsubscribe. Little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer? Phishing.
  - dijit 4y ago
    The annoyance I felt that I was a “good” postmaster and I was punished as a part of being from a tribe of bad postmasters. Google et al. can’t tell the difference when you hit spam. We never bought or sold any email lists, we went out of our way to ensure you wanted to be on the list- we made it single link with no extra checkbox or button to unsubscribe, we emailed only occasionally and above all we did our absolute best to make the content humorous and engaging. You can make the case that there should be “no automated mail trying to sell things” and honestly, thats fine, but why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?
nkrisc 4y ago
> I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button. You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much spam I’m not going to try to figure out what is actually spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking “unsubscribe” links in emails I assume are malicious spam anyway. If it looks automated and I don’t know what it is or can’t remember why I’m getting it, it’s spam. Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign up to receive a marketing email so if I do receive yours it’s either spam or you tricked me into signing up for it, so it’s also spam as far as I’m concerned.
- kshacker 4y ago
  I do this. And what would help (hey google) is if gmail would remember I requested an unsubscribe and then offer to mark as spam 72 after my request to unsubscribe. As of now, I need to remember who all I tried to unsubscribe and when I get their email 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months later, I don't want to remember my unsubscribe list.
  - pimlottc 4y ago
    I created an “unsubscribed” label for this. I haven’t bothered to automate the rest of the steps you describe but I’m sure it could be done.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Here's the thing. If companies never collected and used email addresses in exchange for providing free webinars, reports, developer seminars, books, reports, etc. they'd do far less of those things because digital marketing would be much more just shouting out into the void with often difficult to measure results. And they'd generally be way out-marketed (and out-sold because marketing brings in leads). You may be fine with all that but remember that selling pays for engineering salaries.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    You’re right. And it’s lead us to a place where I mark most email I get as spam.
AviationAtom 4y ago
Call me crazy, but for a problem folks seem to imply has had everything, including the the kitchen sink thrown at it... why do I have yet to see a single email that has the unsubscribe button at the very top, front and center, the absolute first thing I see?
- dijit 4y ago
  It is. It literally is. Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email. I’m sure you mean the content of the email, but we dont reach out to double opt-in users or transactional emails with an unsubscribe link, since you chose to be there. The unsubscribe link lives near the bottom of the email along with the link to support, in clear text in a font and colour that matches the content.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    I remember seeing that in Gmail years ago, but haven't seen it in a long time. I thought they removed the feature.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    Funny, I know to hit the spam button at the top and the unsubscribe bottom buried in a link at the email footer. Am I blind? Have I somehow clicked "spam" and "unsubscribe" hundreds of times without seeing an obvious "unsubscribe" button at the top? Very dubious. Nope! Just checked Gmail WebView. There is a toolbar at the top with a very prominent"spam" button, and two kebab menus with "filter messages like this", "report spam", "report phishing", but no unsubscribe button.
    - dropofwill 4y ago
      It only shows up if the email has a List-Unsubscribe header set. In Gmail it will appear as a banner underneath the row of buttons
  - _dain_ 4y ago
chillfox 4y ago
I don't mark receipts as spam, but I do delete them without opening them and I really can't blame the people who mark them as spam. When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in some huge html template and the amount needs to be converted. When I buy something in a physical store they have the decency to ask if I want a receipt. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for online stores/services to get, ask me if I want a receipt, don't just stick it in my inbox because you have my email address.
- nl 4y ago
  For accounting purposes the bank receipt will rarely have the details needed for tax (eg in Australia that don't include the ABN).
  - chillfox 4y ago
    The vast majority of the things I buy don't need receipts to be kept and reported for tax. It's personal stuff like a streaming subscription, a book or a game. And the times I have tried to claim expenses as work related (in Australia) that I bought online I have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD.
    - nl 4y ago
      > have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD Claiming expenses is different to tax requirements. With tax you need the receipt as a record, but the general ledger actually records the amount in whatever currency you use. For expense claims every company does it differently.
      - chillfox 4y ago
trimbo 4y ago
I also used to work on email at scale (XXX million per day), and even then I encouraged everyone to click spam[1] for any email they did not expect to receive and do not want. My email address and phone notifications are a direct link to me and are sacred in terms of getting my attention. Yet many companies confuse getting my email address with permission to mail me anything at any frequency. They also believe that "unsubscribe" should be able to redirect me to a website with a bunch of confusing checkboxes. Neither is acceptable. So, when I click "unsubscribe", that should immediately unsubscribe me forever with no extra efforts, but so many emailers don't do this that I just gave up and started reporting spam. > emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months A guess with no info, but it sounds like a case of not removing unengaged recipients, then suddenly getting their attention with a different looking subject line or an email that came at an unexpected time. If people receive bulk for a long time and they never engage, remove them from the list or pause sending to them to avoid this effect. [1] - For those who don't know much about email, two things should happen when you click the spam button in Gmail and select "Unsubscribe and report spam" (it's been a while, correct me if this changed): 1) List-Unsubscribe should be triggered and this should unsub you from the list. In 2023, I personally expect this to be immediate and receive no more email but I give senders a window of a day or so. 2) The FBL should give the sender a signal that this specific campaign was considered spam.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Was your “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the message in small print or was it a large button labeled “stop emailing me” at the top?
notatoad 4y ago
>Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. i see about the same thing. and i'm purely sending transactional receipts (that is, immediately after purchase. not for subscription or pre-order or something disconnected from the user having just entered their email in the "send my receipt to" field) and for non-trivial amounts (averaging around $100). i can't understand how so many people mark them as spam, and although i have no evidence to support it i have to assume that some poorly-configured firewalls are sending spam reports automatically.
thr717272 4y ago
Can confirm. A few years ago and my coworker caught our boss using the spam button instead of delete, even on customer mails discussing (I think) an upcoming project. He was otherwise highly functional, spoke and wrote fluently in three languages but hadn't noticed the difference between spam and delete.

by dijit 4y ago

supertrope 4y ago

I assume you have transactional and marketing emails coming from separate email addresses. If the email ecosystem made it easier for bulk senders, this would just shift the burden onto recipients. Right now the common enemy of illegal spammers externalize the costs of their business onto email providers and users. For every dollar they take they impose 100x that in spam filtering costs. >99.9% of raw email traffic is spam. Blame spammers who offer fake unsubscribe links. Or companies who violate CAN-SPAM by requiring login to unsubscribe instead of one click opt-out. Marking as spam always works.

rationalist 4y ago

How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that business I never had any business with starts spamming me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask for permission. Unfortunately I have a few technology-challenged acquaintances still using my common-ish firslast@ gmail, but once I get them switched over, everything that inbox receives will automatically be marked as spam.

dijit 4y ago
> How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? Double opt-in. You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used to send you an email with a link to click to complete the process. For transactional email this would be handled by getting people to either create an account or use Paypal for guest checkout. (this was 2012)

ChainOfFools 4y ago

People who mark things as junk mail or spam typically have no idea that this action can have an upstream impact on spam filtering algorithms. They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works and just assume that the purpose of marking something is spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it, personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that their preference thus exerts a small influence over the experience of potentially millions of other people. In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users, the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the spam button. But today that definition is something closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I am fairly certain few if any other people are interested in seeing, either."

hurril 4y ago
Oh we do. We just don't want to have your shitty newsletter.
the_af 4y ago
I disagree with your modern definition. Spam to me is unsolicited commercial emails. All email "ads" are spam. Newsletters I didn't subscribe to are spam. Anything trying to sell me something I didn't subscribe to is spam. You bet I'm going to mark it as spam and I hope it creates trouble for the sender. PS: I assume we all agree scams, "Russian singles", chain letters, "little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer", etc, are all spam. That's a shared common ground.
- Breza 4y ago
  I agree with you. Outlook gives me the option to classify an email as either spam or phishing. Newsletter I didn't ask to receive? Spam. Newsletter I signed up for but am tired of getting? Unsubscribe. Little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer? Phishing.
- dijit 4y ago
  The annoyance I felt that I was a “good” postmaster and I was punished as a part of being from a tribe of bad postmasters. Google et al. can’t tell the difference when you hit spam. We never bought or sold any email lists, we went out of our way to ensure you wanted to be on the list- we made it single link with no extra checkbox or button to unsubscribe, we emailed only occasionally and above all we did our absolute best to make the content humorous and engaging. You can make the case that there should be “no automated mail trying to sell things” and honestly, thats fine, but why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?

nkrisc 4y ago

> I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button. You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much spam I’m not going to try to figure out what is actually spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking “unsubscribe” links in emails I assume are malicious spam anyway. If it looks automated and I don’t know what it is or can’t remember why I’m getting it, it’s spam. Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign up to receive a marketing email so if I do receive yours it’s either spam or you tricked me into signing up for it, so it’s also spam as far as I’m concerned.

kshacker 4y ago
I do this. And what would help (hey google) is if gmail would remember I requested an unsubscribe and then offer to mark as spam 72 after my request to unsubscribe. As of now, I need to remember who all I tried to unsubscribe and when I get their email 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months later, I don't want to remember my unsubscribe list.
- pimlottc 4y ago
  I created an “unsubscribed” label for this. I haven’t bothered to automate the rest of the steps you describe but I’m sure it could be done.
ghaff 4y ago
Here's the thing. If companies never collected and used email addresses in exchange for providing free webinars, reports, developer seminars, books, reports, etc. they'd do far less of those things because digital marketing would be much more just shouting out into the void with often difficult to measure results. And they'd generally be way out-marketed (and out-sold because marketing brings in leads). You may be fine with all that but remember that selling pays for engineering salaries.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  You’re right. And it’s lead us to a place where I mark most email I get as spam.

AviationAtom 4y ago

Call me crazy, but for a problem folks seem to imply has had everything, including the the kitchen sink thrown at it... why do I have yet to see a single email that has the unsubscribe button at the very top, front and center, the absolute first thing I see?

dijit 4y ago
It is. It literally is. Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email. I’m sure you mean the content of the email, but we dont reach out to double opt-in users or transactional emails with an unsubscribe link, since you chose to be there. The unsubscribe link lives near the bottom of the email along with the link to support, in clear text in a font and colour that matches the content.
- Izkata 4y ago
  I remember seeing that in Gmail years ago, but haven't seen it in a long time. I thought they removed the feature.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  Funny, I know to hit the spam button at the top and the unsubscribe bottom buried in a link at the email footer. Am I blind? Have I somehow clicked "spam" and "unsubscribe" hundreds of times without seeing an obvious "unsubscribe" button at the top? Very dubious. Nope! Just checked Gmail WebView. There is a toolbar at the top with a very prominent"spam" button, and two kebab menus with "filter messages like this", "report spam", "report phishing", but no unsubscribe button.
  - dropofwill 4y ago
    It only shows up if the email has a List-Unsubscribe header set. In Gmail it will appear as a banner underneath the row of buttons
- _dain_ 4y ago

chillfox 4y ago

I don't mark receipts as spam, but I do delete them without opening them and I really can't blame the people who mark them as spam. When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in some huge html template and the amount needs to be converted. When I buy something in a physical store they have the decency to ask if I want a receipt. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for online stores/services to get, ask me if I want a receipt, don't just stick it in my inbox because you have my email address.

nl 4y ago
For accounting purposes the bank receipt will rarely have the details needed for tax (eg in Australia that don't include the ABN).
- chillfox 4y ago
  The vast majority of the things I buy don't need receipts to be kept and reported for tax. It's personal stuff like a streaming subscription, a book or a game. And the times I have tried to claim expenses as work related (in Australia) that I bought online I have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD.
  - nl 4y ago
    > have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD Claiming expenses is different to tax requirements. With tax you need the receipt as a record, but the general ledger actually records the amount in whatever currency you use. For expense claims every company does it differently.
    - chillfox 4y ago

trimbo 4y ago

I also used to work on email at scale (XXX million per day), and even then I encouraged everyone to click spam[1] for any email they did not expect to receive and do not want. My email address and phone notifications are a direct link to me and are sacred in terms of getting my attention. Yet many companies confuse getting my email address with permission to mail me anything at any frequency. They also believe that "unsubscribe" should be able to redirect me to a website with a bunch of confusing checkboxes. Neither is acceptable. So, when I click "unsubscribe", that should immediately unsubscribe me forever with no extra efforts, but so many emailers don't do this that I just gave up and started reporting spam. > emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months A guess with no info, but it sounds like a case of not removing unengaged recipients, then suddenly getting their attention with a different looking subject line or an email that came at an unexpected time. If people receive bulk for a long time and they never engage, remove them from the list or pause sending to them to avoid this effect. [1] - For those who don't know much about email, two things should happen when you click the spam button in Gmail and select "Unsubscribe and report spam" (it's been a while, correct me if this changed): 1) List-Unsubscribe should be triggered and this should unsub you from the list. In 2023, I personally expect this to be immediate and receive no more email but I give senders a window of a day or so. 2) The FBL should give the sender a signal that this specific campaign was considered spam.

SoftTalker 4y ago

Was your “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the message in small print or was it a large button labeled “stop emailing me” at the top?

notatoad 4y ago

>Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. i see about the same thing. and i'm purely sending transactional receipts (that is, immediately after purchase. not for subscription or pre-order or something disconnected from the user having just entered their email in the "send my receipt to" field) and for non-trivial amounts (averaging around $100). i can't understand how so many people mark them as spam, and although i have no evidence to support it i have to assume that some poorly-configured firewalls are sending spam reports automatically.

thr717272 4y ago

Can confirm. A few years ago and my coworker caught our boss using the spam button instead of delete, even on customer mails discussing (I think) an upcoming project. He was otherwise highly functional, spoke and wrote fluently in three languages but hadn't noticed the difference between spam and delete.