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Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

I did not expect them to ramp up the amount of notification spam 100-fold as I engage with the service less.

I've no intention of logging back in to check my notification settings, but when I was using Facebook, I would get a push notification maybe once or twice every couple of days. Now, I get more than a dozen SMS messages a day.

I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fact that abusing the notification power entrusted to us by our customers was seen as a cardinal sin. Maybe it's the absence of that respect that has catapulted Facebook to where it is, or the presence of it that's held me back in my own endeavors, I don't know, but man, as the recipient of all this spam, it really, really feels unsavory, and further evaporates whatever trust I might have had in the platform.

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> I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fact that abusing the notification power entrusted to us by our customers was seen as a cardinal sin.

The keyword in your sentence is customers. The people using Facebook aren't its customers, they're the product and thus open season for all kinds of nefarious things you'd never do to your customers.

Hmm that is odd. I get the phone notification because I had thst problem if I didn’t remove the app and if I haven’t been on facebook for more than a day.

I think the “user is idle let’s poke the user” is a supposedly a “nice” user engagement to get users back on the system. I hear your concern.

I think at this point:

* opt out notifications before deactivate your account (go to account settings)

* deactivate and opt-out notification at the time of deactivation

* set facebook email as spam or something (although you’d miss any potential real security notifications.)

Or you can also remove your phone number and change the account’s email address. I own a dozen gmail accounts, one for mailing list, one for billing, one for personal, one for school, one for important tech accounts like digital ocean/aws, one for banks, one for general garabge I don’t care and so on. I also run a YouTube channel with a friend so I also own a separate gmail account to be added as a manager of the channel.

Much neater than labels (amazon emails can fuck me up easily, ugh).

I highly recommend this multi-email account approach. I can ignore 50 emails sitting in other accounts most of the time. All of them have second auth and some accounts have different passwords for additional security. Not hard to manage because the address format is always <A>.<purpose>@gmail.com. Consistency!!

Sounds like you could benefit (to some extent except ignoring certain inboxes) from a custom email domain and enabling catch-all. I use this in order to segregate people(services mainly) sending me emails to different addresses that I don't have to manually create (but can easily block/disable an entire address)

The only major issue I've had, with gsuite at least, is not being able to reply from one of the not-actually-existent addresses on my domain.

Try Fastmail. If you want to reply you can setup a sending identity with the necessary email address. You don't have to do anything ahead of time.

Sweet, will check it out, I'm not particularly attached to gsuite

They also have a neat way of doing wildcard delivery if you use them for DNS: tag@name.domain.com gets translated to name+tag@domain.com.

This would definitely help with douchebag sites that consider "+" an invalid character

I was going to, but looking at the benefit of having the rest of the Google applications and being free, I didn't.

Why can't you just click 'unsubscribe' in the bottom of the email?

If they don't provide the unsubscribe option as a one-click option, mark their emails as spam. It's harsh, but getting flagged for spam when they won't stop spamming you or providing the required one-click opt-out is their problem, not yours.

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