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> one or two users mark a newsletter as SPAM. I'm one of them. Those newsletters are spam. I would never sign up for a newsletter and somehow I'm getting those

by kaoD 13y ago

> one or two users mark a newsletter as SPAM. I'm one of them. Those newsletters are spam. I would never sign up for a newsletter and somehow I'm getting those too. If my intent was not to get the newsletter, it's unsolicited mail by definition, i.e. spam. Stop spamming me and I'll stop flagging you. Period. How not to be flagged as spam: - There should be a checkbox clearly visible and it shouldn't be pre-checked. - Your "kind" product reminders are obnoxious too and I'll flag them as spam as well. Did I ask you to remind me of your product? Nope. Unsolicited then. - If you ToS say I agree to receive mail, guess what? I don't agree, I just want to try your product. I'll flag you in a breeze. - Social reminders like Twitter's trending around me or people I might know? SPAM! I don't care if I can disable these, I didn't enable them. - You want to offer me discounts but I didn't ask for them? Flagged! - I submitted a paper to a conference and it got published? Dozens of "calls for papers" in my inbox. Flagged, flagged, flagged, flagged! - Calling it a newsletter or adding a tiny "unsubscribe" link won't hide the fact that it's still spam. I didn't click subscribe, I shouldn't have to unsubscribe. -- EDIT: Woah, this seems controversial. Lots of up- and down-votes. Dear product owners, downvoting me here won't change the fact that me (and your fellow users) will still flag the shit out of your unsolicited mail. I guess it pays if you keep doing it, but you should direct your energy far from that downvote button and closer to "ways not to annoy my users".

_asciiker_ 13y ago
You have all the right to mark it as SPAM of course. What I'm trying to get across here is that IP blocking is a bad solution. There are many cases where several domains share the same IP, specially with the shortage. So if domainA.com sends spam, why should domainB.com mail delivery on the same IP suffer from it?
- kaoD 13y ago
  > So if domainA.com sends spam, why should domainB.com mail delivery on the same IP suffer from it? Because the mail servers both share seem to allow sending unsolicited email, i.e. spam. You're the one responsible for terminating the spamming user.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Police the motherfuckingbejesus out of your users. If it costs you when your IP is blocked, insist on a deposit that's forfeit in the event of spamming. Sadly, I've worked for shops with poor practices. How bad? Sending thousands of emails to domains which no longer existed (let alone stale accounts at existing mail service providers). Simply not a priority.
- DanBC 13y ago
  You would have hated SPEWS.
pavel_lishin 13y ago
I always click the "unsubscribe" link, first. If I get anything else after that, then I mark it as spam. (I don't buy into the 30-business-days bullshit, it's 2014.) I also have catch-all addresses at my domain, so I register for things as SERVICE@mydomain, so I know exactly where spam is coming from. Except I've been doing this for years, and 90% of garbage still just comes to my plain ol' gmail address that I've been using for over a decade, which suggests that businesses finally have wised up to the fact that sending garbage to everyone who puts their email address into a form is a bad, bad idea.
- MBCook 13y ago
  > I don't buy into the 30-business-days bullshit, it's 2014 I just went through that a few weeks ago. I ordered something and the merchant decided to start spamming me with product info on a daily basis. I thought I unchecked the "spam me" button, but I guess I was wrong. So I unsubscribed. And got two more emails. They were required by law to stop sending me emails within 10 business days. They carefully waited exactly 10 business days. In the mean time, they sent me two emails a day in case I might change my mind. After two days I started marking the messages as spam. Luckily they were kind enough to provide me with an opt-out confirmation email. I was ready to sue them when they stopped right at the boundary. Just a pure jack-ass move by the company. I'll never buy from them again.
  - ggreer 13y ago
    I'd appreciate it if you could name the company so that I and others may avoid them as well. Edit: I am very confused by the downvotes.
    - click170 13y ago
      Can someone help me understand why naming and shaming companies for what is in the customer's opinion poor behaviour deserves down-votes? No sarcasm, honest question. Were the down-votes for something else? I honestly think some naming and shaming would be a good thing in situations like this. Especially in this day and age when complaining on twitter is more and more likely to get a response from the company in question.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 13y ago
This. More frequently, I've been taking to /dev/nulling entire domains for crap. Usually recruiters (no, I'm not interested in your underwater basketweaving SEO marketing position in south-west Obscuristan, it's well outside my search and skill parameters). I haven't got around to writing a good set of whitelisting scripts, but that's next. Figuring out if I've subscribed to something, and/or how to MAKE IT STAHHHP really isn't worth my time.
DerpDerpDerp 13y ago
> If you ToS say I agree to receive mail, guess what? I don't agree, I just want to try your product. I'll flag you in a breeze. No. You literally did agree. That you don't like that it's a package deal, and you're exchanging getting their sales email for trying their product just makes you an asshole, but it doesn't make their message spam. You established a business relationship with them, in which they told you ahead of time they'd do follow-up contact, and then you have the gall to complain about it in a way that damages the reputation of people who relay the messages you agreed to receive. Way to make the world a worse place.
- kaoD 13y ago
  Fair enough. Yes, I agreed, but if I stop using your product, can't rescind the implicit contract and I am no longer interested, I will flag without compassion. A product reminder is implicitly out of the terms of service, since I'm actually not using the service anymore. Also: the other six points still stand. > Way to make the world a worse place. Seriously? I should've added that sentence to my post for dramatic effect too.
  - coldpie 13y ago
    > Seriously? I should've added that sentence to my post for dramatic effect too. The issues is that spam filters learn. I fucking hate spammers, too, and like you I consider unsolicited emails to be spam. But when you flag mostly-legitimate, but still unwanted, emails as spam, gmail learns the wrong thing. Suddenly really legitimate emails get flagged as spam. My domain renewal emails from my registrar recently started getting filtered to my spam box, and I suspect it's due to users flagging any unwanted email as spam. In my opinion, the best way to deal with these unsolicited emails is to use the unsubscribe link, delete the email, and then swear at them on Twitter or find their CEO's email and send them goatse or something. Fuck 'em. That way you get your revenge, and you don't muck up the spam filter for everyone.
    - thenewbtg 13y ago
      "In my opinion, the best way to deal with these unsolicited emails is to use the unsubscribe link, delete the email, and then swear at them on Twitter or find their CEO's email and send them goatse or something. Fuck 'em. That way you get your revenge, and you don't muck up the spam filter for everyone." This is totally absurd. My choices are "click one button" or "do a whole lot of bullshit that sounds like a lot of annoying work". I hope you can understand why "one button" is taken more often than "raise hell on and offline". The real solution is to separate spam and unwanted emails. Gmail and services need to add a separate button for non-spam unwanted emails, so they can categorize and learn about usage habits effectively. But it's horrific, insanely bad UX design to create a flawed system then blame the users for using it naturally. I'm sorry but the user is not wrong, the system is wrong. The solution isn't "user training", it's "system redesign". If the system were designed correctly, users would naturally gravitate to the correct option without training. That's good UX. Until then, it's perfectly acceptable to use whatever tools are available to achieve the desired outcome. That's software for you.
saurik 13y ago
It is users such as yourself that make spam filters have the kinds of silly false positives being discussed in this thread: as a user (not as a product owner; I am a product owner, but I don't send e-mail, so I have no "skin in the game": so, you can claim all you want that the people downvoting you are all product owners, but some of us really do just feel you are abusing a shared system to carry on some kind of personal vendetta) it really sucks that I can't trust spam filters to not filter valid e-mail out of my inbox because people like you are so trigger-happy (and in some cases, simply vindictive) with the spam button... it is my sincere hope that services like Gmail are at least sometimes smart enough to realize "this person is just being annoying" and makes your spam votes meaningless :/.
- kaoD 13y ago
  None of those are false positives. Spam is unsolicited mail. Did I solicit the mail? - Yes: not spam. - No: spam. And, since I never solicit promotional email to my personal address, my method is 100% accurate. In my opinion the companies sending unsolicited promotional email are the ones gaming the system taking advantage of the "well this might be unsolicited but it's not v14gr/\" grey area.
  - just_bytecode 13y ago
    By this definition John sending an unexpected party invitation to his friend Dave is spam. edit: I guess spam is by definition commercial email. Still, I think it's possible to have a business relationship with a company where it's acceptable for them to send an occasional email that you didn't specifically request.
    - awda 13y ago
      Business relationships are different from personal relationships, and "solicit," in this case, does not mean literally request the email. It is perfectly reasonably to describe unexpected email from a friend as solicited and unexpected product email from a business as unsolicited (even if you've had contact with them previously). It is unlikely that the business is your friend ;-).
logicallee 13y ago
Your comment is insane! "If your ToS say I agree to receive mail, guess what? I don't agree, I just want to try your product. I'll flag you in a breeze." So you don't agree to the terms you just read before giving out your email address. That's insane! It's like smiling and saying to a guy, "Here's my number", and not saying: "But if you call me, for any reason, I will report you for harrassment", without any indication that this is how you feel. Absolutely insane. Why would you give out your email address with that attitude? "Here is my email address, but the only thing you should use it for is to let me ruin your communications with others who agree to the same thing I just agreed to, if I receive anything I might conceivably have given it to you for." If you don't want to get ANYTHING, EVER, then what is the purpose of giving out a means to communicate with you??? What did you think you are doing by giving out an email address?? It's just so bizarre. Do the world a favor and register an email address for what you consider spam, which is everything. Then never look at it again, while that email address gets invitations and calls to publish in journals, updates on the product offerings you are interested in, informative newsletters, free money on things that you're already spending on, and so forth... while you get nothing. Boy you sure are showing them though!
- kaoD 13y ago
  It's actually like I were asked for my number to get a service and then the company started calling me twice a day to offer me things I don't even want or care for because it falls within their carefully-worderd-ToS. Do I agree to get emails sent to me from <random company> as long as they're product-related and I'm using their service? Yes I do. Will I mark these as spam? No I won't. Do I agree to getting promotional emails or reminder emails when I stopped using their service months ago? No I don't. Will I mark these as spam? Yes I will.
  - logicallee 13y ago
    But do you even try clicking unsubscribe? What you're describing is just so different from real spam.
    - kaoD 13y ago
eli 13y ago
I can tell you from experience that some small percentage of people will mark your message as spam even if they specifically requested it -- heck, even if they want to continue receiving it in the future. I routinely deal with people complaining about not getting a newsletter they requested after they marked it as spam (once they do that, we are required by agreement with the ISP to not send them any more messages ever).
- Steuard 13y ago
  I'm really curious about this ISP agreement. My wife hit a bug in the new Yahoo mail interface that led her to accidentally mark a few messages as spam. She immediately fixed the mistake, but it turned out that (unbeknownst to her) she was unsubscribed from an important mailing list as a result. So she and I had two questions that we never resolved. First, is it really true that hitting the "Spam" button on a site like Yahoo or Gmail informs the sender of your email address? (Doesn't this lead to the usual concerns about confirming a valid address?) And second, what is a user supposed to do in the case of an accidental bump of the "Spam" button? Is there really no way to undo the damage (both to the sender and to the willing recipient)?
  - MitziMoto 13y ago
    > is it really true that hitting the "Spam" button on a site like Yahoo or Gmail informs the sender of your email address? Yes. The feedback loop shows the sender who marked the mail as spam. > What is a user supposed to do in the case of an accidental bump of the "Spam" button? Is there really no way to undo the damage (both to the sender and to the willing recipient)? There is no good solution, it kind of sucks for both the sender and the receiver. When you click that spam button, intentional or not, I can no longer send you email until going through a sometimes laborious process of working with the email service to get the email unblacklisted. If you really want to receive email again, send an email to the company/person and let them know you accidentally clicked the spam button so they can work it out with the email provider. Gmail handles this the best IMO as it gives the user ~5 seconds to click "undo" before reporting the spam. As far as I can tell most other email clients are instantaneous.
jt2190 13y ago
I downvoted this message because it assumed that _asciiker_ was a bad actor who wanted to deliver spam, rather than assume that the he was perhaps misinformed about the best way to avoid delivering unwanted messages. It ignored the context of the original post (someone managing email servers for an ISP) and assumed that he was creating the spam messages directly. It took what could have been a reasonable thread about managing email and polarized it into a pro/anti spam thread. (edit: Replaced "parent poster" with username of poster, to avoid confusion.)
- kaoD 13y ago
  I'm the parent author. I didn't use "you" referring to _asciiker_. It was plural you, not singular you, referring to "you damn spammers" as a third person, not "you _asciiker_". I will henceforth carefully choose my pronouns.
snowwrestler 13y ago
You are getting down voted (rightly so IMO) because you posted an irrelevant personal rant in reply to someone who had the temerity to describe a challenge in the modern email system. You have no idea if the parent sends out a single unsolicited email. All you saw was "newsletter" and you flew off the handle. Not that you're alone; this happens in every single HN thread about email marketing, and is in my opinion one of the worst killers of signal to noise ratio on HN. We love to talk about "growth hacking" but every mention of email marketing is a race for HN comments denouncing all email as spam. The fact of the matter is that even the most carefully run, innocuous, double opt-in email newsletter is occasionally reported as spam. I think it is because paranoid tech folks have spent years telling people to never use an unsubscribe link because it just makes the spam worse. But if it's an email you actually signed up for, the unsubscribe link is the correct and appropriate way to unsubscribe.
newaccountfool 13y ago
If you accept the terms without reading them (Not un ticking the newsletter button) then its your fault and you should be penalized for wrongly marking email as spam when you didn't even read the signup form to realise you were agreeing to receive emails. Its people like you that make it so hard to send emails to people, even when they agree to receive emails.
Aldo_MX 13y ago
I always try to unsubscribe first, and only when unsubscribing does nothing, then I proceed to mark the mail as spam.
richardw 13y ago
And now I have to check my spam folder to discover messages I signed up for. And I still get real spam because gmail's tools are diluted. I think spam reporting is made too easy. I also hate over-sharing sites but not as much as I hate true spam. Unsub should be one click, spam reporting should be four clicks. Or hopefully gmail gives you an internal "spam report reliability" score so it knows you're a more trigger happy than I am. And no, I've never sent a product mass mail out ever.
pja 13y ago
Just to illustrate a typical modern 'social' website email experience: I just signed up to MeetUp. Here's what I apparently signed up for just by giving them an email address so I could get information about a local event that someone has invited me to: * Meetup Messenger A fun, informative newsletter to Organizers and anyone interested in running a Meetup * Meetup HQ Announcements Get promotional emails from Meetup HQ * Weekly Personal Calendar A once-weekly email of your Meetups and top Meetups in your area * New Meetup Group Announcements Get email alerts about new Meetup Groups that match your interests * Meetup Surveys An occasional email survey asking your opinion about new or existing features, your Meetup Group(s), Meetup sponsorships, and other requests for feedback. * Greetings Send me an email when somebody posts a Greeting So that's a minimum of a weekly email that I don't care about, plus promotional emails that I definitely don't care about: Joy unconfined. No mention of all these is made during the signup process that I can recall. Logging in with Facebook instead and letting them mine my FB friends graph instead is looking tempting frankly. I can totally understand some people responding to this kind of 'dark pattern' email signup by block marking everything that isn't directly relevant to what they signed up for in the first place as spam. Marking it as spam means they never have to look at it ever again & is practically effortless on their part. Sure, they could log back into the website in question (if they can find the password / can be bothered to log into Facebook) and faff around looking for the email subscription settings, but marking it as spam in GMail is quicker & easier: it's win all round from the user's point of view.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

by kaoD 13y ago

_asciiker_ 13y ago

You have all the right to mark it as SPAM of course. What I'm trying to get across here is that IP blocking is a bad solution. There are many cases where several domains share the same IP, specially with the shortage. So if domainA.com sends spam, why should domainB.com mail delivery on the same IP suffer from it?

kaoD 13y ago
> So if domainA.com sends spam, why should domainB.com mail delivery on the same IP suffer from it? Because the mail servers both share seem to allow sending unsolicited email, i.e. spam. You're the one responsible for terminating the spamming user.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Police the motherfuckingbejesus out of your users. If it costs you when your IP is blocked, insist on a deposit that's forfeit in the event of spamming. Sadly, I've worked for shops with poor practices. How bad? Sending thousands of emails to domains which no longer existed (let alone stale accounts at existing mail service providers). Simply not a priority.
DanBC 13y ago
You would have hated SPEWS.

pavel_lishin 13y ago

I always click the "unsubscribe" link, first. If I get anything else after that, then I mark it as spam. (I don't buy into the 30-business-days bullshit, it's 2014.) I also have catch-all addresses at my domain, so I register for things as SERVICE@mydomain, so I know exactly where spam is coming from. Except I've been doing this for years, and 90% of garbage still just comes to my plain ol' gmail address that I've been using for over a decade, which suggests that businesses finally have wised up to the fact that sending garbage to everyone who puts their email address into a form is a bad, bad idea.

MBCook 13y ago
> I don't buy into the 30-business-days bullshit, it's 2014 I just went through that a few weeks ago. I ordered something and the merchant decided to start spamming me with product info on a daily basis. I thought I unchecked the "spam me" button, but I guess I was wrong. So I unsubscribed. And got two more emails. They were required by law to stop sending me emails within 10 business days. They carefully waited exactly 10 business days. In the mean time, they sent me two emails a day in case I might change my mind. After two days I started marking the messages as spam. Luckily they were kind enough to provide me with an opt-out confirmation email. I was ready to sue them when they stopped right at the boundary. Just a pure jack-ass move by the company. I'll never buy from them again.
- ggreer 13y ago
  I'd appreciate it if you could name the company so that I and others may avoid them as well. Edit: I am very confused by the downvotes.
  - click170 13y ago
    Can someone help me understand why naming and shaming companies for what is in the customer's opinion poor behaviour deserves down-votes? No sarcasm, honest question. Were the down-votes for something else? I honestly think some naming and shaming would be a good thing in situations like this. Especially in this day and age when complaining on twitter is more and more likely to get a response from the company in question.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 13y ago

This. More frequently, I've been taking to /dev/nulling entire domains for crap. Usually recruiters (no, I'm not interested in your underwater basketweaving SEO marketing position in south-west Obscuristan, it's well outside my search and skill parameters). I haven't got around to writing a good set of whitelisting scripts, but that's next. Figuring out if I've subscribed to something, and/or how to MAKE IT STAHHHP really isn't worth my time.

DerpDerpDerp 13y ago

> If you ToS say I agree to receive mail, guess what? I don't agree, I just want to try your product. I'll flag you in a breeze. No. You literally did agree. That you don't like that it's a package deal, and you're exchanging getting their sales email for trying their product just makes you an asshole, but it doesn't make their message spam. You established a business relationship with them, in which they told you ahead of time they'd do follow-up contact, and then you have the gall to complain about it in a way that damages the reputation of people who relay the messages you agreed to receive. Way to make the world a worse place.

kaoD 13y ago
Fair enough. Yes, I agreed, but if I stop using your product, can't rescind the implicit contract and I am no longer interested, I will flag without compassion. A product reminder is implicitly out of the terms of service, since I'm actually not using the service anymore. Also: the other six points still stand. > Way to make the world a worse place. Seriously? I should've added that sentence to my post for dramatic effect too.
- coldpie 13y ago
  > Seriously? I should've added that sentence to my post for dramatic effect too. The issues is that spam filters learn. I fucking hate spammers, too, and like you I consider unsolicited emails to be spam. But when you flag mostly-legitimate, but still unwanted, emails as spam, gmail learns the wrong thing. Suddenly really legitimate emails get flagged as spam. My domain renewal emails from my registrar recently started getting filtered to my spam box, and I suspect it's due to users flagging any unwanted email as spam. In my opinion, the best way to deal with these unsolicited emails is to use the unsubscribe link, delete the email, and then swear at them on Twitter or find their CEO's email and send them goatse or something. Fuck 'em. That way you get your revenge, and you don't muck up the spam filter for everyone.
  - thenewbtg 13y ago
    "In my opinion, the best way to deal with these unsolicited emails is to use the unsubscribe link, delete the email, and then swear at them on Twitter or find their CEO's email and send them goatse or something. Fuck 'em. That way you get your revenge, and you don't muck up the spam filter for everyone." This is totally absurd. My choices are "click one button" or "do a whole lot of bullshit that sounds like a lot of annoying work". I hope you can understand why "one button" is taken more often than "raise hell on and offline". The real solution is to separate spam and unwanted emails. Gmail and services need to add a separate button for non-spam unwanted emails, so they can categorize and learn about usage habits effectively. But it's horrific, insanely bad UX design to create a flawed system then blame the users for using it naturally. I'm sorry but the user is not wrong, the system is wrong. The solution isn't "user training", it's "system redesign". If the system were designed correctly, users would naturally gravitate to the correct option without training. That's good UX. Until then, it's perfectly acceptable to use whatever tools are available to achieve the desired outcome. That's software for you.

saurik 13y ago

It is users such as yourself that make spam filters have the kinds of silly false positives being discussed in this thread: as a user (not as a product owner; I am a product owner, but I don't send e-mail, so I have no "skin in the game": so, you can claim all you want that the people downvoting you are all product owners, but some of us really do just feel you are abusing a shared system to carry on some kind of personal vendetta) it really sucks that I can't trust spam filters to not filter valid e-mail out of my inbox because people like you are so trigger-happy (and in some cases, simply vindictive) with the spam button... it is my sincere hope that services like Gmail are at least sometimes smart enough to realize "this person is just being annoying" and makes your spam votes meaningless :/.

kaoD 13y ago
None of those are false positives. Spam is unsolicited mail. Did I solicit the mail? - Yes: not spam. - No: spam. And, since I never solicit promotional email to my personal address, my method is 100% accurate. In my opinion the companies sending unsolicited promotional email are the ones gaming the system taking advantage of the "well this might be unsolicited but it's not v14gr/\" grey area.
- just_bytecode 13y ago
  By this definition John sending an unexpected party invitation to his friend Dave is spam. edit: I guess spam is by definition commercial email. Still, I think it's possible to have a business relationship with a company where it's acceptable for them to send an occasional email that you didn't specifically request.
  - awda 13y ago
    Business relationships are different from personal relationships, and "solicit," in this case, does not mean literally request the email. It is perfectly reasonably to describe unexpected email from a friend as solicited and unexpected product email from a business as unsolicited (even if you've had contact with them previously). It is unlikely that the business is your friend ;-).

logicallee 13y ago

Your comment is insane! "If your ToS say I agree to receive mail, guess what? I don't agree, I just want to try your product. I'll flag you in a breeze." So you don't agree to the terms you just read before giving out your email address. That's insane! It's like smiling and saying to a guy, "Here's my number", and not saying: "But if you call me, for any reason, I will report you for harrassment", without any indication that this is how you feel. Absolutely insane. Why would you give out your email address with that attitude? "Here is my email address, but the only thing you should use it for is to let me ruin your communications with others who agree to the same thing I just agreed to, if I receive anything I might conceivably have given it to you for." If you don't want to get ANYTHING, EVER, then what is the purpose of giving out a means to communicate with you??? What did you think you are doing by giving out an email address?? It's just so bizarre. Do the world a favor and register an email address for what you consider spam, which is everything. Then never look at it again, while that email address gets invitations and calls to publish in journals, updates on the product offerings you are interested in, informative newsletters, free money on things that you're already spending on, and so forth... while you get nothing. Boy you sure are showing them though!

kaoD 13y ago
It's actually like I were asked for my number to get a service and then the company started calling me twice a day to offer me things I don't even want or care for because it falls within their carefully-worderd-ToS. Do I agree to get emails sent to me from <random company> as long as they're product-related and I'm using their service? Yes I do. Will I mark these as spam? No I won't. Do I agree to getting promotional emails or reminder emails when I stopped using their service months ago? No I don't. Will I mark these as spam? Yes I will.
- logicallee 13y ago
  But do you even try clicking unsubscribe? What you're describing is just so different from real spam.
  - kaoD 13y ago

eli 13y ago

I can tell you from experience that some small percentage of people will mark your message as spam even if they specifically requested it -- heck, even if they want to continue receiving it in the future. I routinely deal with people complaining about not getting a newsletter they requested after they marked it as spam (once they do that, we are required by agreement with the ISP to not send them any more messages ever).

Steuard 13y ago
I'm really curious about this ISP agreement. My wife hit a bug in the new Yahoo mail interface that led her to accidentally mark a few messages as spam. She immediately fixed the mistake, but it turned out that (unbeknownst to her) she was unsubscribed from an important mailing list as a result. So she and I had two questions that we never resolved. First, is it really true that hitting the "Spam" button on a site like Yahoo or Gmail informs the sender of your email address? (Doesn't this lead to the usual concerns about confirming a valid address?) And second, what is a user supposed to do in the case of an accidental bump of the "Spam" button? Is there really no way to undo the damage (both to the sender and to the willing recipient)?
- MitziMoto 13y ago
  > is it really true that hitting the "Spam" button on a site like Yahoo or Gmail informs the sender of your email address? Yes. The feedback loop shows the sender who marked the mail as spam. > What is a user supposed to do in the case of an accidental bump of the "Spam" button? Is there really no way to undo the damage (both to the sender and to the willing recipient)? There is no good solution, it kind of sucks for both the sender and the receiver. When you click that spam button, intentional or not, I can no longer send you email until going through a sometimes laborious process of working with the email service to get the email unblacklisted. If you really want to receive email again, send an email to the company/person and let them know you accidentally clicked the spam button so they can work it out with the email provider. Gmail handles this the best IMO as it gives the user ~5 seconds to click "undo" before reporting the spam. As far as I can tell most other email clients are instantaneous.

jt2190 13y ago

I downvoted this message because it assumed that _asciiker_ was a bad actor who wanted to deliver spam, rather than assume that the he was perhaps misinformed about the best way to avoid delivering unwanted messages. It ignored the context of the original post (someone managing email servers for an ISP) and assumed that he was creating the spam messages directly. It took what could have been a reasonable thread about managing email and polarized it into a pro/anti spam thread. (edit: Replaced "parent poster" with username of poster, to avoid confusion.)

kaoD 13y ago
I'm the parent author. I didn't use "you" referring to _asciiker_. It was plural you, not singular you, referring to "you damn spammers" as a third person, not "you _asciiker_". I will henceforth carefully choose my pronouns.

snowwrestler 13y ago

You are getting down voted (rightly so IMO) because you posted an irrelevant personal rant in reply to someone who had the temerity to describe a challenge in the modern email system. You have no idea if the parent sends out a single unsolicited email. All you saw was "newsletter" and you flew off the handle. Not that you're alone; this happens in every single HN thread about email marketing, and is in my opinion one of the worst killers of signal to noise ratio on HN. We love to talk about "growth hacking" but every mention of email marketing is a race for HN comments denouncing all email as spam. The fact of the matter is that even the most carefully run, innocuous, double opt-in email newsletter is occasionally reported as spam. I think it is because paranoid tech folks have spent years telling people to never use an unsubscribe link because it just makes the spam worse. But if it's an email you actually signed up for, the unsubscribe link is the correct and appropriate way to unsubscribe.

newaccountfool 13y ago

If you accept the terms without reading them (Not un ticking the newsletter button) then its your fault and you should be penalized for wrongly marking email as spam when you didn't even read the signup form to realise you were agreeing to receive emails. Its people like you that make it so hard to send emails to people, even when they agree to receive emails.

Aldo_MX 13y ago

I always try to unsubscribe first, and only when unsubscribing does nothing, then I proceed to mark the mail as spam.

richardw 13y ago

And now I have to check my spam folder to discover messages I signed up for. And I still get real spam because gmail's tools are diluted. I think spam reporting is made too easy. I also hate over-sharing sites but not as much as I hate true spam. Unsub should be one click, spam reporting should be four clicks. Or hopefully gmail gives you an internal "spam report reliability" score so it knows you're a more trigger happy than I am. And no, I've never sent a product mass mail out ever.

pja 13y ago

Just to illustrate a typical modern 'social' website email experience: I just signed up to MeetUp. Here's what I apparently signed up for just by giving them an email address so I could get information about a local event that someone has invited me to: * Meetup Messenger A fun, informative newsletter to Organizers and anyone interested in running a Meetup * Meetup HQ Announcements Get promotional emails from Meetup HQ * Weekly Personal Calendar A once-weekly email of your Meetups and top Meetups in your area * New Meetup Group Announcements Get email alerts about new Meetup Groups that match your interests * Meetup Surveys An occasional email survey asking your opinion about new or existing features, your Meetup Group(s), Meetup sponsorships, and other requests for feedback. * Greetings Send me an email when somebody posts a Greeting So that's a minimum of a weekly email that I don't care about, plus promotional emails that I definitely don't care about: Joy unconfined. No mention of all these is made during the signup process that I can recall. Logging in with Facebook instead and letting them mine my FB friends graph instead is looking tempting frankly. I can totally understand some people responding to this kind of 'dark pattern' email signup by block marking everything that isn't directly relevant to what they signed up for in the first place as spam. Marking it as spam means they never have to look at it ever again & is practically effortless on their part. Sure, they could log back into the website in question (if they can find the password / can be bothered to log into Facebook) and faff around looking for the email subscription settings, but marking it as spam in GMail is quicker & easier: it's win all round from the user's point of view.

deleted 13y ago

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