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Comment by danielfoster | Hacker News Reader

I used Mailchimp to collect email addresses for an beta user waitlist in 2015. I eventually used a work-around to disable double opt-in because so many users had signed up, never clicked the confirmation email, and were then confused why they never received access to our product when others had.

As a user I also prefer single opt-in. If I sign up for something, I want to be signed up. Clicking confirmation links is an annoying extra step.

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Here's the thing, though.

As a user, if I start getting your mailing list emails because someone else decided to sign me up and there was no confirmation, I'm going to mark it as spam.

That should be a minimal number of cases, reduced further by having a big clear one click unsubscribe option.

It always amazes me the business that make unsubscribing difficult. That is the real way to get placed in spam.

Does anyone trust the unsubscribe link in apparent spam, though?

Many less technical folks do. If I never signed up, I'm absolutely not clicking an unsubscribe link.

I'm pretty sure clicking the unsubscribe button says "hey, this email address you obtained is real and active!"

That feels very "20 years ago" to me. They've got plenty of other ways. Don't get me wrong, I'm a bit careful with them but because I'm used to being signed up to lists by a handful of stupid people who don't know their email address, I can basically anticipate what regions of the world my spamlists will come from, and I generally have a good feel for what's legit or what's not. I use the unsubscribe link often for these things.

Too late, enough businesses have screwed up the unsubscribe system that now I mark every mail as spam and let the spam filters take care of it.

I don't care if the unsubscribe links works or not, I already have a faster path.

I don't care how clear the unsubscribe option is, if I didn't specifically subscribe, it gets marked as spam and reported.

I'm not clicking an unsubscribe button on something I didn't subscribe to. I have no way of knowing if it will unsubscribe me or if it will tell the sender "Hey guys! This is a real email address! Send him more spam!"

...or worse: send you to an infected URL and pwn you

Clicking unsubscribe isn't the only way to know if the email is good. If your email client loads images then it will be known if you opened the email which will also give your IP, geolocation, device type, client name, user agent, etc.

Depending on your email provider if you mark it as spam that could also be known by the sender if your provider supports the complaint feedback loop.

Here are the docs to see what info is available when sending through mailgun.

https://documentation.mailgun.com/en/latest/api-events.html#...

Most clients don't load images by default. The big providers (gmail and the like) certainly don't.

That's what I've always heard and I can only speak to my personal experience on this, but we track open rates on our marketing emails and have a 36% open rate historically. I'm sure this isn't everyone who is opening them as some percentage have images disabled, but to me this says that a large percentage of our clients do have images enabled as I doubt our actual open rate is tremendously higher than what we are seeing reported.

With Gmail's web interface, it's more complicated than that. Images are loaded by default, but only through a proxy: Google's servers go fetch the image for you and then serve you the image. They only do this once you open the email. So you do leak whether you opened the email, but not your IP address, browser headers, etc. Here's a blog post from 2013 about it: https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...

Why would that be minimal? If I’m your competitor, I’m going to sign up my colleague, and have him report you for spam. And I’m going to loop this until you lose your mailing privileges.

Should, but isn't. I have idiots who think they have my email address sign me up for shit constantly. Don't put the onus on me to unsubscribe from some scammy crap. I've never forgotten to opt in to something I actually wanted, so the "minimal number of cases" actually applies to double-opt-in being hard. The frequent use case is stupid or malicious people spamming me with a list owned by an irresponsible owner. Which is now turning into "every MailChimp list owner except those who actively opt out of this crappy system." Ironic.

that never happens though

There is a guy who has a name similar to mine, who tends to enter my email address everywhere. So best case I just get his signup mails (multiple times because he doesn't understand why he doesn't get them). Worst case I'm signed up for yet another spam list.

They better not be complaining that their reputation is bad because I keep reporting their unconfirmed junk.

If clicking a link is too hard for you, tough.

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