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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten into the habit of spam labeling these emails, hoping they contribute to the great spam filter in the sky. This works much better than unsubscribing because most of these emails aren't even intended for me but the jerks who keep using my email address to sign up for services and aren't required to verify the email address they provided.

One thing I've realized having moved away from Gmail to fastmail, is the importance of owning your spam data as I had to train Fastmail's spam system.

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Gmail offers to unsubscribe when you mark the mail as spam.

This is super convenient when you have ten or more "newsletters" you want to unsubscribe from simultaneously.

I first try to find an unsubscribe link, but if there is none or it's broken, then into the spam filter the message goes.

If you didn’t subscribe, don’t unsubscribe. Set up a filter that auto-reports as spam. That way you don’t have to see it ever again, but you still give spam filters a fighting chance at stopping other people from seeing it too. The more you hurt their deliverability, the less effective spamming will become.

Note you can do both (as I do).

Fastmail allows unlimited aliases. Just use an alias on every shady website and not only can you just delete the alias when you’re done, but you’ll also know who sold away your email address in the first place.

I do the same. I feel I might be confirming my email address to spammers if I click that "unsubscribe" button.

Also a longtime Fastmail user, and I do tend to notice Way More spam and more serious phishing emails.

There are benefits to centralisation, one of which is Google's access to all Gmail spam reports

I still prefer to keep my stuff away from Google's grubby hands though. Fastmail's spam filter does get better the longer you train it

Which can be massaged.

Is Fastmail less centralized somehow?

Did I claim it was?

Sorry if you see this later, it came out more blunt than I had wanted it to.

I didn't mean to imply fastmail was centralised in the original comment if it came off as that :)

That gets you blacklisted on email service providers so you risk missing order confirmations etc.

Pretty sure sending only legitimely useful emails to customers will not get any vendor blacklisted.

You’re sure that Google’s vast completely automated system for determining which senders should be blacklisted has zero false positives?

It's alright though, because senders who get blacklisted will act swiftly to get authorized again.

You mean it gets the spammer blacklisted so they risk being unable to contact me.

I've actually pinged a couple of services to let them know that spamming me is a security vulnerability, because they loose their ability to contact me.

The thing is you'll be the one inconvenienced.

Let's say you often buy on Amazon (or any other online shop), they send you a newsletter. If you mark it as spam instead of unsubscribing, you could be losing some of their emails you'd want to see (order confirmation, response to a message you sent them, etc).

I have simple solution for that. If the newsletter doesn't stop and keeps coming, I would just cancel my email address amzn1@mydomain and open another one amzn2@mydomain. If the spam persists, I just move business elsewhere. As simple as that.

Really? How would they even know? I've been clicking "report as spam" for anything with a not-immediately-obvious or intentionally complicated unsubscribe button (to punish shady tactics) for a very long time now and I haven't seen any signs of missing any order confirmations.

Spam reports (at least with aws ses) get reported back to the sender.

Not sure I follow.

Are you saying that a substantial number of people is routinely using your _fastmail_ address with services that send _marketing_ emails to _unverified_ email addresses?

I find this highly implausible.

Edit -

Why the downvotes? If I read the OP correctly, they have such a common address that random people mindlessly type it into various subscription nags. Can you think of a such @fastmail address?

If it's not that common, then their address was just leaked and ended up on the spammers list, so tagging as spam is a proper thing to do. However it sounds like the OP also spam-tags bulk emails they don't like even if they are subscribed to those, which is as ass thing to do. It hinders delivery to others, nicks the sender reputation, etc.

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