Hacker News Reader

Comment by erdo | Hacker News Reader

I once got a marketing email from British Airways with no "unsubscribe" link, I emailed back telling them to take me off their list as I never asked for marketing emails when I booked my ticket.

The crazy thing is they replied, but refused to take me off the list unless I sent them an actual physical letter in the post. A few emails in they claimed it was due to a "technical" issue. That BS annoyed me so much, I am now into the 3rd decade of my own personal British Airways boycott

Edit: I realise that's insane but it makes me giggle everytime I deliberately don't book BA, and I wonder to myself how much money I would be willing to loose by going for the next most expensive ticket, just to keep my boycott going

View on HN

I engage in petty boycotts like this.

Even if it’s PEANUTS to them. I feel better, because at least I’m not participating in perpetuating a shitty system.

I feel especially good about it when those companies are ubiquitous and hard to avoid, because I feel rather righteous against an all encompassing behemoth that likely would have got my money otherwise.

>I once got a marketing email from British Airways with no "unsubscribe" link

I just use Gmail's "Report as Spam" feature in these cases. If enough people do it when they can't unsubscribe easily, it's gonna start eating into their deliverability.

I just mark as spam, every time. Hopefully it tanks their deliverability a bit.

I'm glad I'm not crazy, or at least not alone in my craziness !

I end up engaging in the same type of behaviour with companies that also do not make unsubscribing obvious, or, worst of all, have slightly annoying GDPR-mandated tracking-denying UIs. Trying to get me to go through two sub-menus and not having a "Deny all" toggle ? Good, good, good. See how petty I can get, $COMPANY !

> The crazy thing is they replied, but refused to take me off the list unless I sent them an actual physical letter in the post. A few emails in they claimed it was due to a "technical" issue. That BS annoyed me so much, I am now into the 3rd decade of my own personal British Airways boycott

I'm surprised BA even had email in 1991 or earlier. Since britishairways.com doesn't even make an appearance in the Wayback Machine until late 1998, perhaps we can forgive them their anachronistic practices of the day.

Sorry if this makes everyone feel older... but the 2000s, 2010s, and now 2020s... makes three distinct decades.

Thanks for the perspective.

If someone says they are "into the 3rd decade of" something (for example, programming experience), I would generally assume that means 30 years or more.

But what you're saying is that it could mean as little as 11 years, e.g., from 2010 to 2021 (yes, 2010 is still part of the '00 decade¹ and 2021 marks the beginning of the '20s, strange as that was to me).

¹ https://www.farmersalmanac.com/new-decade-2020-or-2021-10090...

To me, the natural interpretation (at least in contexts where calendar-decades don't have special importance) would be 20+ years. The first decade is the first ten, the second decade is the second ten, and the third decade begins after that.

"into the n-th decade of X" sounds like "n-th decade of X has started but not fully completed yet" meaning "n-1 full decades + something" for me (non-native speaker)

Yes that's a great point, I was trying to remember when it happened and I think I was about 23 which would make it 21 years ago.

It's much more fun for me to think of that as "in to the 3rd decade", rather than just over 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com