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Comment by ammon | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking into what's happening with this email. We definitely did not decide to re-email people invited a long time ago as a growth tactic. That would be shitty. I think the email is a reminder that's supposed to be sent a few times after someone is invited. I'll update when I know what's happening.

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See my comment below. You have been emailing me every two month for more than two years.

Similar thing here, every couple months for a year, original invitation over two years ago. I haven’t personally been all that bothered by it honestly - it seemed pretty likely that my friend is not sending a new invitation every couple months like clockwork, and presumably I can stop it by clicking once on unsubscribe. But probably it would be better to be explicit that it is not a new invitation.

Same, I think I either set up a filter or routed to spam after being unable to stop the emails using their unsubscribe system.

An interesting piece of advice that I saw in another HN thread about good company behaviours stuck with me over the years. When someone unsubscribes from your mailing list, delete their email address from your database. Don't retain it marked "inactive" or "unsubscribed" so that you can accidentally or on purpose start emailing them again later. Really delete it, so that you no longer have it and CAN'T make that error.

But then we can't "accidentally" re-enable it later?!

But then it can be accidentally re-added to the mailing list since there's no history of the opt-out.

If the person chooses to opt back into the mailing list (all mailing lists should be double opt-in) then of course they can be re-added. There is nothing wrong with quitting a mailing list and re-joining sometime later, if that is what you want to do.

It seems pretty amazing to me that apparently some X000ish people have apparently been getting spammed by a company for multiple years and not a single one of them decided to contact the company and ask them to stop it. It's like a real world example of the bystander effect, writ large.

The effect of noreply@

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