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Comment by Hoasi | Hacker News Reader

Mail privacy is the right thing to do and implement it will be a major improvement!

That doesn’t threaten email newsletters that are legitimate and of interest to real subscribers. Communication should never rely on espionage tactics even for the sake of metrics. Forgo monitoring people, customers, or would-be customers, and save a ton of time as a result.

Marketing experts will start talking about how two ways conversation is the ultimate email strategy that works. Send a non-tracked email, let them hit reply. Brands and consumers, united in conversation, finally. That is as horizontal as it gets.

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Have you ever managed a newsletter? Mail providers such as gmail use things like open rates to determine if a message should be in important, promotions, or spam.

Also, a sizeable chunk of people refuse to click unsubscribe links and instead hit the spam button. This can be a sensible response, as a lot of spam senders ignore unsubscribe. But it is also hard for legit newsletters.

So what is the best practice? Pruning your list of people who never open it. This improves open rates, makes gmail like you, and unsubscribes people who already would prefer not to read your letter.

Now it will be much harder to know who is inactive so you’ll end up sending more mail to people who don’t want it. And no double opt in doesn’t solve this.

There are other ways around the problem, but you seem to be in complete ignorance of what newsletter senders use tracking for.

Open rates also let you diagnose deliverability issues.

To be honest, these days I'll click the unsubscribe link in newsletters and stuff, but if they expect me to click on another small link on a website or even enter my email again I just go back and report it as spam. Spoken to some friends who do the same, and I feel that this is the only reasonable approach to take with this.

This is why a legit newsletter might have a confirm step:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469535

I’ve had to deal with customers angry they did not get emails they wanted, and we tracked it back to a security service at their employer that auto-clicks all email links to check them. We had to add a confirm step to unsubscribe to keep it from happening. We’re B2B and I suspect it’s a much bigger issue than B2C because so many companies run custom email setups.

You know what, that's a pretty good reason. Guess I'll add "click an unsubscribe button on a simple website" to my list of acceptable ways to handle unsubscribing. :)

You might be able to check the user agent to differentiate legitimate users from automated scanners?

There's always the chance that they use a browser's user agent to disguise themselves but that should be easy to check.

I bet most scanners use a "human looking" user agent otherwise it would be trivial to cloak the page when the scanner checks it.

Which isn’t related to what you are replying to. We are talking of legit newsletter that offer 1 click unsubscribe.

Did those people who hit the spam button subscribe to the newsletter or were they subscribed without their consent? Seems odd that people would go to the trouble of subscribing to a newsletter only to send it to the spam folder. On the other hand if they didn't (go through the trouble of subscribing), then it is spam.

Generally yeah some people will just hit spam as unsubscribe even to something they signed up for. A lot of people have email overwhelm. You gotta figure that a fraction of people on any service behave oddly.

I’ve even done it myself on occasion when I’m pretty sure I HAVE unsubscribed but I keep getting mail (from things I likely signed up for)

> Seems odd that people would go to the trouble of subscribing to a newsletter only to send it to the spam folder.

It happens. You have people in this thread explaining they hit the spam button when unsubscribe has a confirm step, even if they know they signed up.

There has also been long-standing advice not to hit unsubscribe on spam because all it does is confirm you’re there. A surprising number of people think that means never hit unsubscribe links at all, even in things you signed up for.

> It happens. You have people in this thread explaining they hit the spam button when unsubscribe has a confirm step, even if they know they signed up.

This is also not a user problem.

I admit I haven't managed a newsletter, but if I would either sign up people that don't want to either through lying or dark patters, or make it hard for them to unsubscribe, meaning any step other than link click (and maybe a yes/no confirmation), then I don't expect not to be treated as spam.

I explain why a legit email program might have an unsubscribe confirm step here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27470090

It’s to solve a particular user problem.

I accounted for this in my comment. There's confirm steps and then there's confirm steps. When I want to unsubscribe from your newsletter you already know my address, I shouldn't have to enter it, I shouldn't have to list a reason (though by all means keep it as an optional), I shouldn't have to do more than one extra click.

If you indeed meant a simple "Yes I'm sure" confirmation button, then I agree.

You’re not paying attention to what you’re reading. The parent comment is saying some users will do this on all newsletters, even ones they signed ip for.

We’re talking about newsletters that only add people who sign up after a double opt in. We still have to manage this user behaviour.

Proactive pruning is the best tool that exists now. So we’ll have to figure out something new. One likely result is more paid newsletters and more moves to centralized platforms like substack which can deal with this.

> You’re not paying attention to what you’re reading. The parent comment is saying some users will do this on all newsletters, even ones they signed ip for.

I was paying attention, I was commenting on specifically:

> they hit the spam button when unsubscribe has a confirm step

Even if I've signed up for a newsletter, if I have to jump through (varying degrees) of hoops to unsubscribe, you are spam.

How would he know? How would anyone know??

I've seen people enter their email into those intrusive "sign up for our newsletter" popovers because they think that's the only way to bypass them. Which is probably one reason why sites keep using them. Not everyone is as web savvy as we like to think.

I report every newsletter and similar as spam because I have never knowingly or wittingly signed up for one. If I receive one, I was tricked into signing up for it (or never did), thus: spam.

workflow may be something like 1. Free music 2. required signup for band newsletter 3. Why am I receiving this newsletter? 4. Mark as spam

> 1. Free music 2. required signup for band newsletter

Where "required signup" may simply mean missing the tiny checked-by-default "don't not subscribe me" checkbox.

I have zero sympathy for complaints about marking "legitimate" newsletters as spam, when many of their ideas of "signed up" involve not unchecking a checkbox during a transaction. If you can't get someone to knowingly and enthusiastically agree to receive your newsletter, without any kind of subterfuge or dark pattern, it deserves to get marked as spam and end up in people's spam folders.

It’s not a checkbox, it’s a trade. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll send you a free song.

That’s the deal you made. Don’t get pissed if they keep their end of the bargain.

I'm not talking about "sign up to get this for free", I'm talking about the very common case of a transaction to purchase or otherwise obtain something (potentially even a paid transaction) where there's a buried fine-print "spam me" checkbox.

This is the comment you were replying to:

> workflow may be something like 1. Free music 2. required signup for band newsletter 3. Why am I receiving this newsletter? 4. Mark as spam

So as I said, the deal is clear: Free music in return for signing up for the band’s email list. Don’t get pissed at the band for holding up their end of the deal and putting you on their email list.

The comment I wrote in response was 'may simply mean missing the tiny checked-by-default "don't not subscribe me" checkbox'. That doesn't describe all cases, just many common cases, hence the "may". If the deal is "free music if you subscribe" or "sign up to our newsletter and get free music", and that's presented in an obvious and non-deceptive way, and people sign up anyway, then sure, that's a legitimate subscription. (And people will still mark it as spam if they don't actually want it, and that's something to take into account when thinking of designing a system like that.)

And if the deal is "free music! Also, check this clearly identified box that's currently not checked if you want to subscribe to our newsletter", that's also a legitimate subscription; some people will still mark that as spam, and that's just something newsletters have to deal with, but I have marginally more sympathy for that case because spammers have somewhat ruined the concept of expecting reasonable unsubscribe links in unexpected mail.

But if the deal is "free music! (well-hidden fine print: leave this box checked to subscribe to our newsletter)", and someone misses unchecking the box, that's spam, and it should get marked as spam, and that newsletter should have serious deliverability problems; that's spam filtering working exactly as it should work.

From my experience, the straightforward trade where a subscription to the band’s newsletter (or reactivation if you’ve previously unsubscribed) is the price for the free song is the scenario. Right or wrong, people mark those newsletters as spam or delete them without opening them to check for an unsubscribe link.

People will mark spam as spam, but they also have no hesitation about marking legitimate bulk e-mail they willingly signed up for but are no longer interested in as spam as well.

To me this sounds like spam. If they want the music, give them the music. Don't make them sign up for your spam to get it.

It is spam unless they signup because they want the actual newsletter.

I don't think these changes at Apple will ruin your use case at all. From what I've read, will load images privately, which means it'll probably hide IP (as they've mentioned) and details about browser etc. It'll still need to load the image. If you were to create a specific image for every sent email, you can still see whether that image was accessed by Apple. Unless they create something like a CDN to cache every image people receive, even if they don't open the email, you'll still be able to see whether an email was opened. You just won't be able to see from where, or from which browser, which seems unnecessary in your use case.

To me this seems like the only actual negative impact could be on LE, who sometimes use this technology to find missing persons.

Edit: I was wrong, upon further reading they do get the images for every email, even ones that weren't opened. Seems wasteful (the majority of my email never gets opened), but it's a great implementation. Guess it's time to give Apple Mail another try.

I do understand it is tough out there for a newsletter.

The problem is, the same tactics that they want to use, that I might put up with for a slightly-trusted sender, are used by spammers for mostly the same reasons.

And I am not willing to put up with the repercussions of that for the benefit of some newsletter operators who are not me.

So there's the problem to be solved.

I’ve seen how fungible email lists can be for marketing departments.

I’ve seen cases of “I very carefully opted out of your dark pattern, and then your automatically opted in my account after the fact”.

Unfortunately a lot of companies that will take your email for verification/password resets don’t keep that list away from their marketing department.

True, but that has nothing to do with the comment you responded to. Regardless of whether tracking pixels are blocked or not, scummy marketers are still going to do that.

The question is, will it hurt the indie newsletter guys and gals, the people sending stuff you actually want? Certainly yes. They won't know if they're still giving their audience something of value.

The bigger problem, in my mind, is the unintended consequences of this. Will blocking tracking pixels actually cause those scummy marketers to send even more emails? My guess is, absolutely yes.

Post-tracking, nobody can prove the marketing department emails are ineffective or hurting deliverability by oversending, so let's blanket inboxes with as many as we can!

This is so true. Bad open rates are the #1 tool I use to convince colleagues to send less email.

The immediate impact of Apple’s new feature is going to be a big increase in open rates. It’s going to be so hard to explain why that is not necessarily good.

The best practice is supposed to be RSS (or something in that paradigm).

The problem with RSS is you can’t force sign up people without them realising.

Almost all newsletters are spam and should be treated as such.

Based on this, I predict that newsletters will start forcing you to click a link to read the entire newsletter.

That is what will happen. Send an excerpt and to view the full post click on the link, which will be tracked along with the website which serves content filled with javascript trackers and cookies :(

This was industry standard for email in publishing a decade ago. Email was just a tool to drive web traffic.

Over the past few years we’ve seen that change, to where entire businesses have been built around putting the content directly into the email (The Skimm, Substack, Axios, etc). It will be interesting to see if it switches back, if clicks are the only thing senders can measure.

What about Fonts and CSS, will that too be proxied and auto downloaded? if not then Substack, etc will start using that to track open-rates.

It’s a good question. I’m definitely interested to do some testing to see exactly how the new Apple feature works.

Simple: send a letter every month with a link that says “Click here if you still want to receive this newsletter”. Then remove everyone from the list who hadn’t clicked it after a week.

Sure, and that’s not spammy at all

I think this could be done without being too obnoxious: 'We try not to send emails to people who're not interested - click here to confirm that you still want to get this newsletter'.

It doesn't have to be every month - each time someone reconfirms their interest, you could wait longer before asking again.

You don't need to send this email to everyone. Only to those users who haven't clicked on a single link of your regular newsletter for the past X months.

And doesn’t have any negative repercussions forcing people to constantly repeat themselves. “Yes, I still want what I said I wanted a month ago.”

“Why did you stop sending it to me?”

“You didn’t say you it.”

Yes I did! 15 times!

Well, not this month.

It’s like consent for sex is supposedly supposed to be like today for some inexplicable reason.

Maybe if it was easier to unsubscribe (i.e. by making the unsubscribe button prominent) than to report as spam, less people would default to reporting it as spam. But in my experience, the unsubscribe button is quite difficult to find.

Using unsubscribe buttons is a waste of time.

Most spammers use that to make sure that an email is still active.

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