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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you.

How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

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Most sites do this already, at least they should if they want to make sure more of their emails don't end up in junk folders. Deliverability is really important to both businesses and email service providers, so a lot of the time, bounce unsubscribes and spam unsubscribes are baked in and easing off subscribers who don't open or click emails is a best practice for deliverability purposes.

Yes it's pretty much common best practice

Mail providers offer sending to your webhooks or block them directly on their side (so you dont have to worry about it)

Many do that probably, Indian firms don't for sure, I always block them, spam them and complain via twitter and after weeks of follow up do they remove my email id from their spam emails.

> If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you.

How would they know?

In addition to the header info mentioned in other comments, email providers let you subscribe to email Feed Back Loops. You register for FBLs (man it's a neverending process since there's a never ending pile of new email providers), and when someone marks something as spam, the email provider (gmail/outlook/etc) will send an email to a registered address, you just listen for emails on that address. I wrote a custom handler to do this, as we already had a system in place to process incoming email from users (respond to comment email instead of replying on web form etc). I then unsubscribe the address in question.

Not all providers offer FBLs, in that case my internet provider gets an abuse notice which is forwarded along to me. Not a ton of activity there on a 500k person mailing list, the FBLs are pretty effective.

Also, since we have the email processing system in place, it's easy to detect bounces and auto unsubscribe people. I immediately unsubscribe on a hard bounce, and wait for 5 soft bounces before doing the same thing.

You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.

Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.

When I've usually clicked the report spam and unsubscribe button after reporting spam in gmail it usually immediately opens a tab with the unsubscribe URL.

I've since stopped doing it since the last thing I want to do is open up some random page belonging to the person who spammed me.

That's strange. I thought the point of that button was to overcome the exact problem you just described.

Tried it again with a different message and they said they'd try to unsubscribe me this time instead of opening a link.

Did try again yesterday with a different spam message and had it open a tab though; Zapier was spamming me with some newsletter so I clicked "Report Spam and Unsubcribe" yesterday and it opened up this in a new tab: https://zapier.com/app/settings/email?payload=REMOVED

Not really sure how it determines that -- I'll probably avoid clicking it just out of precaution and just report spam going forward though.

Using a lot of the privacy and security measures suggested in https://www.privacytools.io/ I sometimes do a gmail search using 'is:unread in:all unsubscribe' and click on most of the links I can find.

In some cases, Gmail automatically detects the unsubscribe link. If you click Gmail's unsubscribe link, it may give you a pop-up or it may automatically write an email to unsubscribe@example.com. The pop-up usually leads to a form that you have to fill to 'update your newsletter preferences'.

What information does this reveal besides your email address, which they clearly already have?

It's a feedback signal showing success at passing automated spam filters.

It confirms that the address is valid, and most likely attended by a real person.

But there are gazillion email leaks. Go scrape them all with hashed passwords. Active emails have no value.

Leaks may have emails that are defunct, belong to dormant accounts nobody reads, throwaway accounts like mailinator.com, honeypots, etc. This confirms the account belongs to a real human actively reading the email.

You're right that they don't have value but there's still plenty of idiots out there buying and selling useless lists and while they're worthless they have a cost to us as recipients since we have to mark them as spam and delete them.

It reveals that their email was detected as spam by an intelligent piece of meat instead of a shard of silicon.

Email lists with verified activity have a higher success rate and sell for more.

Many times when you hit the spam button, gmail ask if you want to "only mark as spam" or "mark as spam & unsubscribe".

Would make sense to prevent themselves to be marked as spam in the future.

idk, I'm trying to find a way a bad actor could take advantage of that information. Kind of helpful for spammers to get a sense of what does and does not get marked, but they can just see how many people clicked the link.

In the past (10+ years ago), clicking the Unsubscribe link in a spam email was a sure way to get your email address sold to every spammer out there.

Most of those bad actors seem to have been weeded out, but some still might try it.

In the comments, they explain that Sendgrid gets notified of spam marks, and Sendgrid gives SO a webhook whenever someone marks as spam. So they then unsubscribe that user.

They probably assume if you make as spam, you will also be unresponsive to the email. If you are responsive they can say that overrides the marking as spam action.

See the List-Unsubscribe mail header.

Sorry, if this is off-topic, you hit a nerve.

The absolute antibehavior of what you descrcribe I've recently experienced with Air Asia.

A few month ago they started to spam me with a newsletter I never requested. Last time I flew them was in the beginning of 2015 and I never subscribed for their crap.

The unsubscribe link on the mail does not work and after a significant amount of digging I found a way to unsubscribe by sending mail to unsubscribe@fly.airasia.com.

Only that mail to this address is never delivered.

In essence there seems to be no way to unsubscribe from their list.

I mention that because it's infuriating that "reputable" companies think they can spam away with gusto without even the possibility to unsubscribe from their shit.

Here's a hint for you Air Asia: You are not reputable! You are on the same level as pushers of fake knock-off Viagra, purveyors of fake shlock Rolexes, and Nigerian scammers! And you will never, ever get an additional cent from me.

Scum!

I think you're pretty on topic. Airlines...

I have had a very similar with Air France who I flew with once, through a "hacker" booking of a flight provided by Delta but through Air France's site to save hundreds of dollars over Delta's.

They actually subscribed me to four newsletters: "Flying Blue", "Hello from KLM US", "Air France USA", AND "iFly KLM Magazine United States". From those I've received ~75 messages over the past year.

Their unsubscribe links do not actually work. They prompt you to log in, but I can't log in to my account because I don't recall ever making one (and I'm diligent about storing passwords in a manager). Attempting to reset my password leads to a screen that says I'm locked out of my account for 3 unsuccessful attempts, and the only possible option is to call them. It's so broken. </rant>

A perfect CAN-SPAM complaint opportunity.

I'm not sure if they're required to conform to it being outside of the US. A quick Google search sounds like it might be based on whether the mail server is in the US or not.

Despite never having Comcast nor living in an area Comcast serves, I constantly get email from them. To unsubscribe I must login to my (nonexistent) account.

This may actually be against the CAN SPAM Act of 2003, which requires that non-transactional unsolicited commercial mail provide a means of being removed from the mailing database through the same means that the mail is sent.

IANAL, so I don't know if logging into an account would count or not. Personally, I see it as a hindrance to unsubscribing and by my reading of the CAN SPAM Act, it is illegal, but.. not a lawyer.

EDIT:

From https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can... (which isn't the Act itself, but an FTC compliance guide):

    Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Maybe not sending an email in the first place?

If their product is so great, they don't need to spam anybody, specially developers, to go look at it.

I really like email as a discovery channel for new products personally. Is there something else or another format you prefer?

Probably going to get downvoted for the unpopular opinion but community curated news sites ala. Reddit/HN are way better at this than private communication channels like emails.

I spent a big part of the past year in email marketing for another company... It is a huge job for any organization, I'm glad that SO has such high standards. Making the product as good as possible, over making interaction the goal in and of itself without thinking of the need for that interaction.

In lecture 6 of "How to start a startup", entitled "Growth", Alex Schultz touches on this point specifically in a hypothetical concern people might have of being too spammy. His point was that one should worry about the marginal user who doesn't get notifications, not about the power users who are grown ups and can set filters. Granted, SO is no longer a "startup" but growth is still relevant to it nonetheless and it is interesting to note that the question of emails is far from being over and done with.

How about opt-in first?

If SO here I'd like to extend my thanks to. I might be interested in "offers" but it'd be nice to detect when I don't give a sh*t about it and back off.

SO is doing it right. But the community will very likely not care.

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