10 ms·

> we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newslett

> we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type. (Edit: Also, everything requiring a notification - by e-mail if they couldn't get me to install their app - just to get me to engage with their site.) Once such behavior has the potential of landing your entire domain in the spam folder, maybe they'll be more careful. Edit: For example, I can't imagine LinkedIn being able to pull of their "phish people, steal their address book, spam each contact three times with no opt-out" bullshit for so long if strict spam thresholds were in place.

3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago
What do you mean? There’s a huge difference between “Product Spotlight” and “Best Deals” /s
sleepyhead 3y ago
This is exactly why GDPR exists. What you are describing is illegal in the EU. Sending marketing communication requires clear opt in consent.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  I just had this experience today. The problem is that at least in the States the regulation is ambiguous enough to be abused to hell and back. Unsubscribe in the States could mean “Unsubscribe from all” or “Unsubscribe from 1 of 20” or it could mean “unsubscribe from all now, but we will arbitrarily resign you up for some new newsletter whenever we feel like it”. I got a spam email today from some no name dropshipper I bought contacts from probably a decade ago, I got LASIK 3 years ago and haven’t needed contacts since. Some large companies even flagrantly violate the extremely lax rules that exist in the States. Guitar Center has infamously been sending me emails that are in direct violation of the one click unsubscribe regulations for almost a decade now. I can’t even sign in to the account to cancel the emails (which is in direct violation of the regulation- it is ambiguous on a lot of things but the one thing that it isn’t is that you aren’t supposed to be required to log in to opt out of email communications) because it was made with my dad’s email from 20 years ago yet I’m the recipient of the spam. I did report them; but of course nothing must have happened because they are still doing it.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    > unsubscribe from all now, but we will arbitrarily resign you up for some new newsletter whenever we feel like it The LinkedIn way.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  Are you sure? I don't have more than anecdotal data, but I remember unsubscribing from EU newsletters to be much more cumbersome than from US ones.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    If it's at all difficult just reply saying something with the 'GDPR' keyword and they'll hop on it. A few times I've had unsubscribe links absent or not working for whatever reason and done that and a human's replied and sorted it out.
  - sleepyhead 3y ago
    What do you mean, how is there a difference between unsubscribing a newsletter from a EU company than a US company?
  - carstenhag 3y ago
    I was recently subscribed to ~500 newsletters within 10 minutes, and the most annoying ones to unsubscribe where from Brasil, US, India, etc. (An attacker used the paypal guest account feature and used my IBAN [european bank account number] and tried to hide the mail within those hundreds of mails. They were successful for some days, until the purchase showed up on my bank account)
  - queuebert 3y ago
    This is my experience as well. US emails are one-click unsubscribe almost without fail, while EU and AU especially require multiple clicks and often entering my email address to unsub. Extremely annoying.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  I don't know the legality of this in the EU but often it is required that you opt-in to these marketing emails to create an account or do other basic things on a website. And then there's those online stores that cover the entire page in a popup that you can get a 20% discount code if you give your email. Technically I've opted into their marketing. But I always just use the coupon and then report the email as spam without bothering to unsubscribe.
  - sleepyhead 3y ago
    If you need to opt-in to create an account then it is illegal. Yes the discount code for newsletter signup is a result of GDPR consent requirement along with growth hacking technique popularity that is incredibly annoying.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- EGreg 3y ago
  Referring people by email to the site!
  - oefrha 3y ago
    > There is simply no easy way for your users to legally invite their own friends to your site, so it can never reach critical mass. Referring friends and family by sending emails on your own? Who the fuck does that since ~2010? Ever heard of social media and instant messengers? Edit: Parent was a wall of text when I responded. Stealth editing it to something completely different is not cool.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      It covers instant messengers too. You need to obtain the consent of the person receiving the message, before prefilling the message with the URL and text for their FRIEND to send them. Sorry buddy. That road is closed for you too! Social media MAY be an exception, but that's because people are already used to receiving a ton of spam on it, so your "viral post" will be ineffective to begin with, and probably filtered by Facebook and not shown to most people at all. Enjoy. All the original social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used ways to invite others by email (famously in Harvard etc.) So now they are burning the bridges behind them and no one can do it anymore.
- lopis 3y ago
  Even European Websites do this. I know that in principle I never check the "I want to receive spam" but I still do and still have to unsubscribe later.
  - sleepyhead 3y ago
    Report them to your local DPA. I do not see this so often with big companies but every growth hacking startup send newsletters without consent.
- switch007 3y ago
  And regularly occurs Also there are separate email marketing laws.
sph 3y ago
If I'm certain I don't know the company, or I know the company but there is no unsubscribe button, it goes straight to Spam, no questions asked. A decade ago I went to my country's embassy to renew my passport, and they now use my email to subscribe me to the newsletters of any new political party. All unsubscribe links just 404s. Shameful behaviour. Anything I receive from any of their political candidates goes straight to spam now. The hope is that I am training the spam filter so it marks those as spam for all other users as well. It's simple really: have clearly visible, working unsubscribe link in the body of the email that doesn't require jumping through hoops, and be from a company I know and use. Otherwise the spam filter learns about it.
- figassis 3y ago
  There's worse. An unsubscribe link that asks you to submit your email. Few things anger me more, because they went through the trouble of pretending to comply, and a decision was made to make my day more difficult.
  - kijin 3y ago
    That exists for a reason, and it's not nefarious at all. Lot of people, especially of the older generation, forward all sorts of emails to their friends and family every day. If one person who received a forwarded email doesn't like it and clicks the unsubscribe link, the original recipient (who clearly likes the email enough to forward it around) gets unsubscribed. That's a bug. If you don't like the unfunny newsletter your uncle keeps forwarding you, that's a problem between you and your uncle, not between your uncle and his newsletter! The email submission form exists to ensure that the person unsubscribing is the person who is actually on the mailing list. It will not prevent an annoyed nephew from deliberately unsubscribing the original recipient, but it will prevent most cases of mistake by third parties. Similarly, many unsubscribe links require two clicks instead of one, because some email services used to automatically check out every link they found in the body of an email. A one-click link would unsubscribe everyone before they even saw the email. Nowadays we have better protocols and better email scanners, but old industry habits die hard.
ACow_Adonis 3y ago
i can't be the only oldskool person on hacker news who knows not to click on unsubscribe buttons because it just identifies you as a legitimate email/mark... these are spammers, not cases where you ever actually signed up to some kind of legitimate newsletter or discussion group. to pretend good faith is your first mistake...
- somehnguy 3y ago
  That's the case for spam sent by illegitimate parties (actual spammers), but any real company (what OP is referring to) will respect the unsubscribe button because they're at risk of being sued otherwise. Clicking unsubscribe in those cases actually does work & doesn't put you at risk of anything.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    I get spam from legitimate companies who don't honor the unsubscribe links. The problem is that many of them use third-party services to handle the unsubscription server so you're feeding the data broker ecosystem with confirmation that you're an active address.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      This is an irrational reason. When you click “mark as spam” the sender can configure the email so your email provider notifies them that you marked it as spam. (See email feedback loop). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) Further, pixels can be embedded in the email so they can see when you open the email and how many times. The sender has every incentive to properly handle unsubscribe to avoid spam traps. If you get big enough, users WILL come sign up for your service with a known spam trap email. If your operations are as sloppy as you’re suggesting, your email sending capabilities go poof.
  - greyface- 3y ago
    > they're at risk of being sued I think this risk is overstated. Individual spam recipients in the United States have no standing to sue under CAN-SPAM; only the FTC does, and there's a high bar to get their attention.
cryptoegorophy 3y ago
I wish Apple Hide My Email features existed 20 years ago. Any new signup now is I use hide my email.
- nvr219 3y ago
  I use fastmail masked email (which is basically the same thing) with the firefox plugin. I love it.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    It gets better when you have your own domain and you can register with throwaways using spamco@mydomain.
    - nusl 3y ago
      [dead]
    - aqfamnzc 3y ago
      I've started doing this about a year ago, but I haven't nailed down an easy way to blacklist addresses from my catch-all. Do you know of a painless way to do that?
      - JoshTriplett 3y ago
        Don't use a catch-all. List specific allowed addresses, and remove them (after reporting) if they become spam sources.
      - jackson1442 3y ago
        In fastmail, rules for specific addresses take priority over catchalls. So if I have a catchall and tell it to bounce emails to spamco@, the bounce rule applies properly.
    - Phelinofist 3y ago
      I share my domain with my parents, so I use my_name@XXX.my_domain.tld instead, whereas XXX is replaced by the service I sub to. That gets routed to my inbox and I have some server rules that sort them in sub-dirs. For more shady stuff I have some throwaway mail at some free mail provider.
pests 3y ago
NextDoor is the absolute fucking worst with this. They sign you up to 10+ lists each in over 9+ categories that results in what feels like 100 different "notification types". Unsubscribing from an email just unsubscribes from that one list. They don't show any other lists or categories (or imply there are more) during this process. Once you login you are greeted with a multi-page disaster to manually untoggle each of the near 100 list types. Then when they add new notifications it is auto-on for everyone.
- appplication 3y ago
  Yes I ran into this the other day when I tried Nextdoor out for the first time. I was actually so in awe of the insane and sociopathic dark pattern that is their email/notification subscription system that I immediately deleted the app. I don’t want to be a user on a platform that treats its users with so little respect.
  - a_wild_dandan 3y ago
    I did the exact same thing a few days ago. I thought NextDoor would be social media that connects me with my local community. Nope. It’s overwhelmingly “recommend me someone for <service>”, camera footage of shady people or crime reports, and complaints about neighbors. The excessive emails were the final straw that took me from indifference to actively excising NextDoor from my phone. So if anyone has ideas for connecting with your local community, I’m still looking…
    - 4ndrewl 3y ago
      We just have a WhatsApp group...
    - pests 3y ago
      > camera footage of shady people or crime reports Which are usually just black people existing or generic "people walking by my house" reports.
  - gumby 3y ago
bruckie 3y ago
> I hope they make it really strict. The threshold is "spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%". That sounds pretty low to me, but I'm not in the bulk email business. I guess maybe a very small number of users actually report spam? Or maybe Google is being strict. Source: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequir https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequir... (I work for Google, but on something totally unrelated, and don't speak for them or have any inside knowledge.)
- Synchro 3y ago
  One of the key problems is that both gmail and Yahoo UIs actively encourage users to report messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. Yahoo is particularly bad at this; it's common for me to receive spam reports from yahoo on an entirely double-opt-in social site I run. My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages. Hotmail/outlook/live is much the same in encouraging spam reporting over unsubscribe, however, their penalties are not as excessive as Yahoo's.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - everforward 3y ago
    > One of the key problems is that both gmail and Yahoo UIs actively encourage users to report messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. I think this is, generally, the correct approach. There isn't really a salient reason to discriminate between "email I don't want from someone I don't know" ("true spam", if you will), and "email I don't want from someone I do know" (aggressive newsletter campaigns et al). Spam is the button to send a signal that you got an email you didn't want. > My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages. This is the system working as intended to me, as the customer of the email service. I like that my email provider is throwing their weight around to put the fear of God into bulk senders and forcing them to think about how this campaign will impact their sendability. I would much rather annoy the hell out of bulk senders than cede emails to spammers like we have with phones.
ihaveajob 3y ago
The worst offenders are those without a link to unsubscribe, and who instead ask you to "reply unsubscribe", which happily for them is also a signal to the email provider that you've interacted with them and therefore are not spam.
geek_at 3y ago
Just a perspective from the other side of the coin: I host various services for schools like online registration for parent - teacher conferences. When the platform is live hundreds of parents are logging in, choosing their appointments and have to confirm them via email (only one email per person not per appointment) And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to. I have correctly configured sfp, dmarc, dkim, reverse dns for the Mailserver and have tested the wording with multiple mail testing services to make sure it doesn't have keywords that get automatically flagged. And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain" There is no form, no human to talk to and they just block you. Angry parents come to me or course because they never redeived the activation link so I had to put up a disclaimer stating that if they should not use a yahoo email address if they have a different one
- Phelinofist 3y ago
  Why confirm via mail at all?
  - justoreply 3y ago
    maybe to confirm that the email is valid?
    - geek_at 3y ago
      Correct! With schools and students there is always incentive for shenanigans. If I didn't test for emails they could just book-block all teachers. There would be other ways to clog the system using trashmail providers but thankfully no student cared enough for that yet
  - carstenhag 3y ago
    This is a requirement in some jurisdictions (double opt in) for some cases. Not sure about "User has a confirmed email + account at our service, he wants to sign up for a reminder" use case though.
citrin_ru 3y ago
> I hope they make it really strict. I hope they not. Gmail spam filter is far from being perfect and classifies many non spam messages/senders as spam. May be because they heavily rely on user reports (to train AI?) and email users tend to report all kind of emails as spam including clearly ham messages like bank statements, appointment notifications, password reset emails e.t.c.
- Synchro 3y ago
  Even gmail's own marketing messages (that I never asked for!) end up in my spam folder. If google can't even reliably send emails to themselves I don't know how they expect anyone else to succeed.
autoexec 3y ago
> I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type. Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. It can even end up getting you more spam (as you've noticed), and what looks like an innocent unsubscribe link can actually take you to a malicious website instead. You've really got nothing to gain by touching spam at all. The best way to deal with the spam that makes it into your inbox, especially spam that comes from specific senders with predictable subject lines/body content like newsletters, is filtering. For example, just auto-delete anything from a domain you never want to hear from again. You never see it, and you leave them spending at least a little time/effort shouting uselessly into the void. I tend not to auto-delete directly, but have things filtered into specific folders just in case. It takes almost no time to clear out when they get very full. Most filters are set once and forget.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. It can even end up getting you more spam (as you've noticed), and what looks like an innocent unsubscribe link can actually take you to a malicious website instead. Yet there are people here on HN telling us that we have some kind of responsibility to watch ads, not block them, and support the kind of people who do this slimy, evil, unethical bullshit.
- Pikamander2 3y ago
  >Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. This only applies to scam emails like newsletters from sketchy domains that you never signed up for, which are sent out specifically to find active email addresses. For those, clicking the "unsubscribe" link is indeed counterproductive. For actual businesses like Linkedin though, it makes more sense than not to unsubscribe from unwanted emails anytime they're sent. On occasion you'll find yourself back on a different newsletter list, but it's relatively rare and more often than not just incompetence rather than malice; legitimate companies want to send their emails out to people who buy stuff, not people who mark them as spam and lower their reputation.
gregorvand 3y ago
It’s fair to say any traditional email provider will still struggle to prevent this ‘legit spam’. We took a different approach at mailpass.io where we assume most of the messages are not important for the majority of inbound email. We suggest giving it a go for then forgetting / not caring about whether unsubscribe actually works
Wojtkie 3y ago
Nextdoor is the absolute worst about this. Selecting unsubscribe only lets you unsubscribe from the "type" of email they're sending you. After unsubscribing 7 or 8 times I just reported the whole domain as spam and blocked it.
- hyeonwho22 3y ago
  You have much more patience than I. After the second email type I deleted my account.
m-p-3 3y ago
Honestly I prefer to subscribe to those kind of newsletter in the form of a RSS feed. They just publish passively, and I choose when to subscribe and unsubscribe on my own term, and it doesn't clutter my mailbox.
disgruntledphd2 3y ago
The Information are so incredibly bad for this. I've requested unsubscriptions multiple times from them and they just can't seem to manage it. Like, presumably their audience won't use them but still it rankles.

3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago

What do you mean? There’s a huge difference between “Product Spotlight” and “Best Deals” /s

sleepyhead 3y ago

This is exactly why GDPR exists. What you are describing is illegal in the EU. Sending marketing communication requires clear opt in consent.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
I just had this experience today. The problem is that at least in the States the regulation is ambiguous enough to be abused to hell and back. Unsubscribe in the States could mean “Unsubscribe from all” or “Unsubscribe from 1 of 20” or it could mean “unsubscribe from all now, but we will arbitrarily resign you up for some new newsletter whenever we feel like it”. I got a spam email today from some no name dropshipper I bought contacts from probably a decade ago, I got LASIK 3 years ago and haven’t needed contacts since. Some large companies even flagrantly violate the extremely lax rules that exist in the States. Guitar Center has infamously been sending me emails that are in direct violation of the one click unsubscribe regulations for almost a decade now. I can’t even sign in to the account to cancel the emails (which is in direct violation of the regulation- it is ambiguous on a lot of things but the one thing that it isn’t is that you aren’t supposed to be required to log in to opt out of email communications) because it was made with my dad’s email from 20 years ago yet I’m the recipient of the spam. I did report them; but of course nothing must have happened because they are still doing it.
- vintermann 3y ago
  > unsubscribe from all now, but we will arbitrarily resign you up for some new newsletter whenever we feel like it The LinkedIn way.
jupp0r 3y ago
Are you sure? I don't have more than anecdotal data, but I remember unsubscribing from EU newsletters to be much more cumbersome than from US ones.
- OJFord 3y ago
  If it's at all difficult just reply saying something with the 'GDPR' keyword and they'll hop on it. A few times I've had unsubscribe links absent or not working for whatever reason and done that and a human's replied and sorted it out.
- sleepyhead 3y ago
  What do you mean, how is there a difference between unsubscribing a newsletter from a EU company than a US company?
- carstenhag 3y ago
  I was recently subscribed to ~500 newsletters within 10 minutes, and the most annoying ones to unsubscribe where from Brasil, US, India, etc. (An attacker used the paypal guest account feature and used my IBAN [european bank account number] and tried to hide the mail within those hundreds of mails. They were successful for some days, until the purchase showed up on my bank account)
- queuebert 3y ago
  This is my experience as well. US emails are one-click unsubscribe almost without fail, while EU and AU especially require multiple clicks and often entering my email address to unsub. Extremely annoying.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
I don't know the legality of this in the EU but often it is required that you opt-in to these marketing emails to create an account or do other basic things on a website. And then there's those online stores that cover the entire page in a popup that you can get a 20% discount code if you give your email. Technically I've opted into their marketing. But I always just use the coupon and then report the email as spam without bothering to unsubscribe.
- sleepyhead 3y ago
  If you need to opt-in to create an account then it is illegal. Yes the discount code for newsletter signup is a result of GDPR consent requirement along with growth hacking technique popularity that is incredibly annoying.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 3y ago
Referring people by email to the site!
- oefrha 3y ago
  > There is simply no easy way for your users to legally invite their own friends to your site, so it can never reach critical mass. Referring friends and family by sending emails on your own? Who the fuck does that since ~2010? Ever heard of social media and instant messengers? Edit: Parent was a wall of text when I responded. Stealth editing it to something completely different is not cool.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    It covers instant messengers too. You need to obtain the consent of the person receiving the message, before prefilling the message with the URL and text for their FRIEND to send them. Sorry buddy. That road is closed for you too! Social media MAY be an exception, but that's because people are already used to receiving a ton of spam on it, so your "viral post" will be ineffective to begin with, and probably filtered by Facebook and not shown to most people at all. Enjoy. All the original social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used ways to invite others by email (famously in Harvard etc.) So now they are burning the bridges behind them and no one can do it anymore.
lopis 3y ago
Even European Websites do this. I know that in principle I never check the "I want to receive spam" but I still do and still have to unsubscribe later.
- sleepyhead 3y ago
  Report them to your local DPA. I do not see this so often with big companies but every growth hacking startup send newsletters without consent.
switch007 3y ago
And regularly occurs Also there are separate email marketing laws.

sph 3y ago

If I'm certain I don't know the company, or I know the company but there is no unsubscribe button, it goes straight to Spam, no questions asked. A decade ago I went to my country's embassy to renew my passport, and they now use my email to subscribe me to the newsletters of any new political party. All unsubscribe links just 404s. Shameful behaviour. Anything I receive from any of their political candidates goes straight to spam now. The hope is that I am training the spam filter so it marks those as spam for all other users as well. It's simple really: have clearly visible, working unsubscribe link in the body of the email that doesn't require jumping through hoops, and be from a company I know and use. Otherwise the spam filter learns about it.

figassis 3y ago
There's worse. An unsubscribe link that asks you to submit your email. Few things anger me more, because they went through the trouble of pretending to comply, and a decision was made to make my day more difficult.
- kijin 3y ago
  That exists for a reason, and it's not nefarious at all. Lot of people, especially of the older generation, forward all sorts of emails to their friends and family every day. If one person who received a forwarded email doesn't like it and clicks the unsubscribe link, the original recipient (who clearly likes the email enough to forward it around) gets unsubscribed. That's a bug. If you don't like the unfunny newsletter your uncle keeps forwarding you, that's a problem between you and your uncle, not between your uncle and his newsletter! The email submission form exists to ensure that the person unsubscribing is the person who is actually on the mailing list. It will not prevent an annoyed nephew from deliberately unsubscribing the original recipient, but it will prevent most cases of mistake by third parties. Similarly, many unsubscribe links require two clicks instead of one, because some email services used to automatically check out every link they found in the body of an email. A one-click link would unsubscribe everyone before they even saw the email. Nowadays we have better protocols and better email scanners, but old industry habits die hard.

ACow_Adonis 3y ago

i can't be the only oldskool person on hacker news who knows not to click on unsubscribe buttons because it just identifies you as a legitimate email/mark... these are spammers, not cases where you ever actually signed up to some kind of legitimate newsletter or discussion group. to pretend good faith is your first mistake...

somehnguy 3y ago
That's the case for spam sent by illegitimate parties (actual spammers), but any real company (what OP is referring to) will respect the unsubscribe button because they're at risk of being sued otherwise. Clicking unsubscribe in those cases actually does work & doesn't put you at risk of anything.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  I get spam from legitimate companies who don't honor the unsubscribe links. The problem is that many of them use third-party services to handle the unsubscription server so you're feeding the data broker ecosystem with confirmation that you're an active address.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    This is an irrational reason. When you click “mark as spam” the sender can configure the email so your email provider notifies them that you marked it as spam. (See email feedback loop). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) Further, pixels can be embedded in the email so they can see when you open the email and how many times. The sender has every incentive to properly handle unsubscribe to avoid spam traps. If you get big enough, users WILL come sign up for your service with a known spam trap email. If your operations are as sloppy as you’re suggesting, your email sending capabilities go poof.
- greyface- 3y ago
  > they're at risk of being sued I think this risk is overstated. Individual spam recipients in the United States have no standing to sue under CAN-SPAM; only the FTC does, and there's a high bar to get their attention.

cryptoegorophy 3y ago

I wish Apple Hide My Email features existed 20 years ago. Any new signup now is I use hide my email.

nvr219 3y ago
I use fastmail masked email (which is basically the same thing) with the firefox plugin. I love it.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  It gets better when you have your own domain and you can register with throwaways using spamco@mydomain.
  - nusl 3y ago
    [dead]
  - aqfamnzc 3y ago
    I've started doing this about a year ago, but I haven't nailed down an easy way to blacklist addresses from my catch-all. Do you know of a painless way to do that?
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
      Don't use a catch-all. List specific allowed addresses, and remove them (after reporting) if they become spam sources.
    - jackson1442 3y ago
      In fastmail, rules for specific addresses take priority over catchalls. So if I have a catchall and tell it to bounce emails to spamco@, the bounce rule applies properly.
  - Phelinofist 3y ago
    I share my domain with my parents, so I use my_name@XXX.my_domain.tld instead, whereas XXX is replaced by the service I sub to. That gets routed to my inbox and I have some server rules that sort them in sub-dirs. For more shady stuff I have some throwaway mail at some free mail provider.

pests 3y ago

NextDoor is the absolute fucking worst with this. They sign you up to 10+ lists each in over 9+ categories that results in what feels like 100 different "notification types". Unsubscribing from an email just unsubscribes from that one list. They don't show any other lists or categories (or imply there are more) during this process. Once you login you are greeted with a multi-page disaster to manually untoggle each of the near 100 list types. Then when they add new notifications it is auto-on for everyone.

appplication 3y ago
Yes I ran into this the other day when I tried Nextdoor out for the first time. I was actually so in awe of the insane and sociopathic dark pattern that is their email/notification subscription system that I immediately deleted the app. I don’t want to be a user on a platform that treats its users with so little respect.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  I did the exact same thing a few days ago. I thought NextDoor would be social media that connects me with my local community. Nope. It’s overwhelmingly “recommend me someone for <service>”, camera footage of shady people or crime reports, and complaints about neighbors. The excessive emails were the final straw that took me from indifference to actively excising NextDoor from my phone. So if anyone has ideas for connecting with your local community, I’m still looking…
  - 4ndrewl 3y ago
    We just have a WhatsApp group...
  - pests 3y ago
    > camera footage of shady people or crime reports Which are usually just black people existing or generic "people walking by my house" reports.
- gumby 3y ago

bruckie 3y ago

> I hope they make it really strict. The threshold is "spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%". That sounds pretty low to me, but I'm not in the bulk email business. I guess maybe a very small number of users actually report spam? Or maybe Google is being strict. Source: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequir https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequir... (I work for Google, but on something totally unrelated, and don't speak for them or have any inside knowledge.)

Synchro 3y ago
One of the key problems is that both gmail and Yahoo UIs actively encourage users to report messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. Yahoo is particularly bad at this; it's common for me to receive spam reports from yahoo on an entirely double-opt-in social site I run. My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages. Hotmail/outlook/live is much the same in encouraging spam reporting over unsubscribe, however, their penalties are not as excessive as Yahoo's.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- everforward 3y ago
  > One of the key problems is that both gmail and Yahoo UIs actively encourage users to report messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. I think this is, generally, the correct approach. There isn't really a salient reason to discriminate between "email I don't want from someone I don't know" ("true spam", if you will), and "email I don't want from someone I do know" (aggressive newsletter campaigns et al). Spam is the button to send a signal that you got an email you didn't want. > My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages. This is the system working as intended to me, as the customer of the email service. I like that my email provider is throwing their weight around to put the fear of God into bulk senders and forcing them to think about how this campaign will impact their sendability. I would much rather annoy the hell out of bulk senders than cede emails to spammers like we have with phones.

ihaveajob 3y ago

The worst offenders are those without a link to unsubscribe, and who instead ask you to "reply unsubscribe", which happily for them is also a signal to the email provider that you've interacted with them and therefore are not spam.

geek_at 3y ago

Just a perspective from the other side of the coin: I host various services for schools like online registration for parent - teacher conferences. When the platform is live hundreds of parents are logging in, choosing their appointments and have to confirm them via email (only one email per person not per appointment) And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to. I have correctly configured sfp, dmarc, dkim, reverse dns for the Mailserver and have tested the wording with multiple mail testing services to make sure it doesn't have keywords that get automatically flagged. And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain" There is no form, no human to talk to and they just block you. Angry parents come to me or course because they never redeived the activation link so I had to put up a disclaimer stating that if they should not use a yahoo email address if they have a different one

Phelinofist 3y ago
Why confirm via mail at all?
- justoreply 3y ago
  maybe to confirm that the email is valid?
  - geek_at 3y ago
    Correct! With schools and students there is always incentive for shenanigans. If I didn't test for emails they could just book-block all teachers. There would be other ways to clog the system using trashmail providers but thankfully no student cared enough for that yet
- carstenhag 3y ago
  This is a requirement in some jurisdictions (double opt in) for some cases. Not sure about "User has a confirmed email + account at our service, he wants to sign up for a reminder" use case though.

citrin_ru 3y ago

> I hope they make it really strict. I hope they not. Gmail spam filter is far from being perfect and classifies many non spam messages/senders as spam. May be because they heavily rely on user reports (to train AI?) and email users tend to report all kind of emails as spam including clearly ham messages like bank statements, appointment notifications, password reset emails e.t.c.

Synchro 3y ago
Even gmail's own marketing messages (that I never asked for!) end up in my spam folder. If google can't even reliably send emails to themselves I don't know how they expect anyone else to succeed.

autoexec 3y ago

> I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type. Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. It can even end up getting you more spam (as you've noticed), and what looks like an innocent unsubscribe link can actually take you to a malicious website instead. You've really got nothing to gain by touching spam at all. The best way to deal with the spam that makes it into your inbox, especially spam that comes from specific senders with predictable subject lines/body content like newsletters, is filtering. For example, just auto-delete anything from a domain you never want to hear from again. You never see it, and you leave them spending at least a little time/effort shouting uselessly into the void. I tend not to auto-delete directly, but have things filtered into specific folders just in case. It takes almost no time to clear out when they get very full. Most filters are set once and forget.

shiroiuma 3y ago
>Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. It can even end up getting you more spam (as you've noticed), and what looks like an innocent unsubscribe link can actually take you to a malicious website instead. Yet there are people here on HN telling us that we have some kind of responsibility to watch ads, not block them, and support the kind of people who do this slimy, evil, unethical bullshit.
Pikamander2 3y ago
>Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. This only applies to scam emails like newsletters from sketchy domains that you never signed up for, which are sent out specifically to find active email addresses. For those, clicking the "unsubscribe" link is indeed counterproductive. For actual businesses like Linkedin though, it makes more sense than not to unsubscribe from unwanted emails anytime they're sent. On occasion you'll find yourself back on a different newsletter list, but it's relatively rare and more often than not just incompetence rather than malice; legitimate companies want to send their emails out to people who buy stuff, not people who mark them as spam and lower their reputation.

gregorvand 3y ago

It’s fair to say any traditional email provider will still struggle to prevent this ‘legit spam’. We took a different approach at mailpass.io where we assume most of the messages are not important for the majority of inbound email. We suggest giving it a go for then forgetting / not caring about whether unsubscribe actually works

Wojtkie 3y ago

Nextdoor is the absolute worst about this. Selecting unsubscribe only lets you unsubscribe from the "type" of email they're sending you. After unsubscribing 7 or 8 times I just reported the whole domain as spam and blocked it.

hyeonwho22 3y ago
You have much more patience than I. After the second email type I deleted my account.

m-p-3 3y ago

Honestly I prefer to subscribe to those kind of newsletter in the form of a RSS feed. They just publish passively, and I choose when to subscribe and unsubscribe on my own term, and it doesn't clutter my mailbox.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago

The Information are so incredibly bad for this. I've requested unsubscriptions multiple times from them and they just can't seem to manage it. Like, presumably their audience won't use them but still it rankles.