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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

That happens to me too. But you know who is a thousand times worse than Linkedin when it comes to these things? Facebook.

At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.

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Anything from a Facebook domain hitting my mail server is bounces them back to Facebook's abuse and postmaster addresses. I know categorically that it is abuse, because I am the sole user of my mail server and do not now and have never had a Facebook account, and have repeatedly asked them in various ways to stop spamming me.

Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.

That seems like it would make it harder for Facebook's abuse team to deal with actual abuse reports.

Thereby resulting in facebook being a worse software for the average user due to their abuse of this one user. Win win for someone who doesn't like facebook.

I am making an actual abuse report.

I am pretty sure a Facebook dev has already set up a rule on the abuse inbox to delete any emails coming from your domain.

You'd probably have more luck marking them as spam in your client. If you're using a webmail service of any note, you're helping to train the filters used by others, and as a bonus, your own profile means you're less likely to get them in the inbox in the future.

Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC.

If you try to unsubscribe from an email list and your request is not honored, file a complaint with the FTC. via https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam

You appear to have missed the part about this being my own mail server.

And I don't need any more luck; my initial problem is solved (I no longer see spam from Facebook, and I am taking steps to ensure they are aware of their problem, in case they weren't).

The problem was worth the time I spent on the config; it is manifestly a waste for me to involve the FTC, since I don't have to worry about Facebook's spam anymore and am willing to eat the tiny amount of bandwidth involved.

For what it's worth I have a Facebook account and have all the email notification settings off and can't remember seeing an email from Facebook in over a year.

I noticed that when I stopped checking my Facebook account, Facebook started sending me FOMO messages ("Hey! You have messages! People are saying things! Please come look!")

I noticed them doing that as well, and did what I usually do with companies that get too chatty: First, turn off the notifications, unsubscribe, etc. Then, if they ignore my preferences or keep adding new categories of notification that are enabled by default, I add a client-side rule to throw away everything they send. This way they get to keep thinking that I receive their spam, and I don't have to see it, which is a win-win (though a sad loss for email in general as an obsessively reliable communication system).

This worked out fine for Facebook: I visit their webpage when I want to know what's going on over there, and they never send me email.

Yes, but it also stops sending you normal e-mail notifications, which is IMHO only annoying because I prefer to use my e-mail client to read messages, invites, etc.

Facebook's email messages used to be pretty useful; they used to contain the actual content of posts. That means if you also turn off remote images, you can actually read Facebook posts without Facebook having realized that you've read it. I've always done this for privacy, until they stopped putting the actual post in their emails.

Hell, I haven't received an email from Facebook since about 2009, I think?

It would probably be pretty trivial to set up a filter or two to automatically delete those emails. Or maybe just leave your account open (though it sounds like you would refuse to do this on principle). I never receive emails from Facebook.

I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"

> I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails.

It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...

I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.

I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)

It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top)

> I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)

It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.

I don't get any emails from Facebook. Have you not set up the account the way you like it? Do you still have stock wallpaper, ringtones etc on your devices? I find out about events in Facebook at the right time; when I'm using Facebook.

Did you miss the point where the poster said "had a FB account for a couple of hours"? I assume this means they deleted their account.

Exactly. If it's 5 minutes per 1 billion customers, 5 billion minutes wasted. That's 9512 years. 135 lives.

I can think of many things waste more of my time than having to delete promotional emails here and there. I get that it's annoying, but let's have some perspective...

Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.

This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time.

That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."

I don't see the fallacy in it. It's just pointing out that a little time wasting at scale actually has a big impact.

The point is that everything at scale as an impact that looks big when aggregated... if you don't actually look at the scale.

135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).

If you're one of the 135 people's lives they've wasted... you might take it a bit more personally. :D

But that's his point: Facebook's emails are not wasting anybody's entire life. The 135 number is an aggregate.

Sure, and he's trying to downplay it.

They're wasting 135 people's entire lives worth of time. Every single day. :(

It's not a fallacy. We really could solve those big problems. It's better than thinking about the huge problem and your tiny ego. It puts things in perspective. Facebook really wastes the equivalent of 135 lives. That's the reverse operation. It takes the relatively trivial 5 minutes from your life and puts it in global perspective. When you're that big and you annoy people in a systematic way you deserve this characterization.

> 1 billion customers...135 lives

That's close to the proportional death rate from air travel accidents (3.6 billion passengers/year, around 500 deaths).

Facebook takes---in Fermi numbers---about as many lives as plane crashes.

Facebook is not wasting emails on 1 billion people. Honestly I'm an active user and dont get a single email. It's a few clicks to turn off all email notifications. If you're not a user then you should get nothing unless someone else is trying to invite you, which is the fault of that person, not the service.

Why the hyperbole?

How do they keep getting around your spam filters? Blocking the domain has worked well for me.

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