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There's a difference between messages nobody wants and messages that you don't want. We've got problems with messages sent to literally millions of people: via

by Aachen 4y ago

There's a difference between messages nobody wants and messages that you don't want. We've got problems with messages sent to literally millions of people: viagra spam, phishing scams, banking malware, you name it. There isn't a problem with messages that you don't want to see in your inbox anymore but that are from a legit business where you can unsubscribe. Trying to unsubscribe from real spam just confirms that the email address is active and the message has been read, and now you'll just get more spam and your email address is more valuable. That's very distinct from a legitimate sender. There's a clear distinction and I'm wondering if we'd have an easier time filtering out the actually bad stuff if people that think like you didn't muddle the data by marking normal email traffic as spam

marktani 4y ago
As they describe, they literally cannot unsubscribe though, so from that perspective marking it as spam is totally legit I see your overall argument, however this dilemma is ultimately caused by PayPal's ruthless/unpredictable ban policy
- Aachen 4y ago
  Yes, this is a special situation with no real good options because paypal is behaving like its usual dickish self. I still don't think that it harms paypal or helps anyone to mark their email as spam. Best would be to create a rule to drop their incoming messages. Or use GDPR or some other legal option if you have time to spare and want to cost them some time=money in dealing with your request.
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    > or helps anyone to mark their email as spam. If it keeps the undesired email from landing in this person's inbox, it certainly sounds like it's helping to me.
    - Aachen 4y ago
      Training a spam filter is not the same as creating a do-not-deliver rule for a given sender. Unless you manage to convince the filter that paypal is the same as a viagra scammer (good luck with that), you'd still get those messages from paypal. Maybe some providers also denylist the sender-receiver pair when you click spam to combat this problem nowadays; back when I used public email services this was rarely the case. Nowadays I use a different system altogether so I don't know if this might now be common. Either way, this is not what the spam button is for, but from this subthread I see that enough people on HN already don't understand how these systems work (and education is hard: people don't even read relevant oneliners pushed in their face at a relevant time, such as error messages), so I guess there's no hope for the general public altogether. I didn't know this is an entirely lost cause and is making me rethink about reporting spam on platforms like reddit. I guess they get so many false positives that I'm wasting my time reporting anything as spam ever.
      - CogitoCogito 4y ago
        Most of my email is on my own server, but in my experience (with gmail, etc.) marking a sender as spam will keep them out of my inbox going forward. I would personally filter the email, but for those who don't understand that process, marking as spam can be effective as well.
Natsu 4y ago
I mean, I agree that there are varying levels of legitimacy, but that's kind of baked into the system at this point and it doesn't help that plenty of spammers don't have legitimate unsubscribe buttons and sell your email to a chain of ever less legitimate players. > There's a clear distinction and I'm wondering if we'd have an easier time filtering out the actually bad stuff if people that think like you didn't muddle the data by marking normal email traffic as spam Something tells me that you missed most of the history of dealing with spam, because people used to be naive about this back in the day and spammers exploited the hell out of them by using unsubscribe to confirm that the email was live and similar tricks. Unwanted is unwanted. It really does vary by person, that much is true, but even your viagra spam is wanted by some people. But the people sending it are very often also doing a lot of shady stuff like running botnets, so the technical measures to stop that look very different from, say, looking up the SPF record for Paypal: https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3apaypal.com&run=toolpage https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3apaypal.com... So the short answer is no, people not wanting to get spammed by Paypal isn't likely to get you more viagra ads from botnets. Maybe, just maybe, it could create some small headache for Sendgrid (who is in Paypal's SPF, but is no small player), but I doubt it. That aside, I think a few of them frequent HN and they can answer that one for themselves if they want to.

by Aachen 4y ago

marktani 4y ago

As they describe, they literally cannot unsubscribe though, so from that perspective marking it as spam is totally legit I see your overall argument, however this dilemma is ultimately caused by PayPal's ruthless/unpredictable ban policy

Aachen 4y ago
Yes, this is a special situation with no real good options because paypal is behaving like its usual dickish self. I still don't think that it harms paypal or helps anyone to mark their email as spam. Best would be to create a rule to drop their incoming messages. Or use GDPR or some other legal option if you have time to spare and want to cost them some time=money in dealing with your request.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > or helps anyone to mark their email as spam. If it keeps the undesired email from landing in this person's inbox, it certainly sounds like it's helping to me.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    Training a spam filter is not the same as creating a do-not-deliver rule for a given sender. Unless you manage to convince the filter that paypal is the same as a viagra scammer (good luck with that), you'd still get those messages from paypal. Maybe some providers also denylist the sender-receiver pair when you click spam to combat this problem nowadays; back when I used public email services this was rarely the case. Nowadays I use a different system altogether so I don't know if this might now be common. Either way, this is not what the spam button is for, but from this subthread I see that enough people on HN already don't understand how these systems work (and education is hard: people don't even read relevant oneliners pushed in their face at a relevant time, such as error messages), so I guess there's no hope for the general public altogether. I didn't know this is an entirely lost cause and is making me rethink about reporting spam on platforms like reddit. I guess they get so many false positives that I'm wasting my time reporting anything as spam ever.
    - CogitoCogito 4y ago
      Most of my email is on my own server, but in my experience (with gmail, etc.) marking a sender as spam will keep them out of my inbox going forward. I would personally filter the email, but for those who don't understand that process, marking as spam can be effective as well.

Natsu 4y ago

I mean, I agree that there are varying levels of legitimacy, but that's kind of baked into the system at this point and it doesn't help that plenty of spammers don't have legitimate unsubscribe buttons and sell your email to a chain of ever less legitimate players. > There's a clear distinction and I'm wondering if we'd have an easier time filtering out the actually bad stuff if people that think like you didn't muddle the data by marking normal email traffic as spam Something tells me that you missed most of the history of dealing with spam, because people used to be naive about this back in the day and spammers exploited the hell out of them by using unsubscribe to confirm that the email was live and similar tricks. Unwanted is unwanted. It really does vary by person, that much is true, but even your viagra spam is wanted by some people. But the people sending it are very often also doing a lot of shady stuff like running botnets, so the technical measures to stop that look very different from, say, looking up the SPF record for Paypal: https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3apaypal.com&run=toolpage https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3apaypal.com... So the short answer is no, people not wanting to get spammed by Paypal isn't likely to get you more viagra ads from botnets. Maybe, just maybe, it could create some small headache for Sendgrid (who is in Paypal's SPF, but is no small player), but I doubt it. That aside, I think a few of them frequent HN and they can answer that one for themselves if they want to.