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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Siftery kind of annoyingly added my OSS project to it and started emailing me about it without me signing up for it... (months ago)

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Inclusions usually come from the community - users tend to add products to their stack, a lot of them obviously being OSS. We have tried to reach out to creators/admins in the past to understand if they'd like to represent themselves in the right way in front of a large buyer group.

Apologies Matt - we'd love it if you gave the platform a try, but will not include you in any future email-campaign, going forward.

How about not emailing like that from the start without an opt-in?

Yup, it's not just a dick move, but is also illegal in some countries (e.g. Germany) and can get you sued.

IANAL, but I think cold emails are still legal in Germany, provided they're not just advertisements (e.g. "someone added you as maintainer of [super awesome project]" is probably OK) and you offer a clearly visible option to unsubscribe (i.e. it shouldn't require posting on a random internet forum to get the attention of a company representative).

In essence, the law prohibits business practices that are an "unacceptable nuisance". While advertising via email spam is clearly called out as such, not all cases are so clear cut and will depend on the judge's opinion of acceptable behavior.

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html

EDIT:

English translation of the law: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg....

You’re far from the only person who has had this experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15549380

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