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I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

by ibz 12y ago

taeric 12y ago
Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.
rev_bird 12y ago
If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.
ccozan 12y ago
I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?
      - johnduhart 12y ago
        > When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries? Never because my grocery store isn't a website.
        thaumasiotes 12y ago
        OK. When was the last time facebook emailed you to confirm that you liked a comment?
        cptn_brittish 12y ago
        The last time I had Facebook emails before I marked Facebook as spam every action which somehow concerned me on Facebook resulted in me getting a email and consequently flooding my inbox. Admittantly this was a few years ago when I finaly had enough of it so they might of gotten better but at one point they did.
        thaumasiotes 12y ago
        Yes, I picked facebook as an example specifically because of their reputation for emailing you about everything. But I think you'll find that they tend to email you when other people do something that, in some sense, concerns you, not when you do something. (Remember the ancestor comment defining "solicited email" as email that responds to an action you take.) "This person just liked your comment" emails are plausible. "You just liked this person's comment" emails are self-evidently absurd, but they fall perfectly within the (spurious) definition of "solicited" that nitrogen wants us to believe in.
      - gaadd33 12y ago
        Every time I order groceries. Then again my grocery store is online.
npsimons 12y ago
Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.
guelo 12y ago
It's probably people like you that misuse the spam button that caused Google to give more weight to other signals for tuning their spam classifier.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more. (And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.) Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.
- npsimons 12y ago
  This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help: 1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons. 2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to. For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

by ibz 12y ago

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

taeric 12y ago

Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.

rev_bird 12y ago

If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.

ccozan 12y ago

I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?

thaumasiotes 12y ago
I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?
    - johnduhart 12y ago
      > When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries? Never because my grocery store isn't a website.
      - thaumasiotes 12y ago
        OK. When was the last time facebook emailed you to confirm that you liked a comment?
        cptn_brittish 12y ago
        The last time I had Facebook emails before I marked Facebook as spam every action which somehow concerned me on Facebook resulted in me getting a email and consequently flooding my inbox. Admittantly this was a few years ago when I finaly had enough of it so they might of gotten better but at one point they did.
        thaumasiotes 12y ago
        Yes, I picked facebook as an example specifically because of their reputation for emailing you about everything. But I think you'll find that they tend to email you when other people do something that, in some sense, concerns you, not when you do something. (Remember the ancestor comment defining "solicited email" as email that responds to an action you take.) "This person just liked your comment" emails are plausible. "You just liked this person's comment" emails are self-evidently absurd, but they fall perfectly within the (spurious) definition of "solicited" that nitrogen wants us to believe in.
    - gaadd33 12y ago
      Every time I order groceries. Then again my grocery store is online.

npsimons 12y ago

Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.

guelo 12y ago

It's probably people like you that misuse the spam button that caused Google to give more weight to other signals for tuning their spam classifier.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more. (And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.) Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.

npsimons 12y ago
This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help: 1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons. 2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to. For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.