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Comment by dmarlow | Hacker News Reader

I don't care that it takes 10 days. What I want is to not get new spam that I have to constantly unsubscribe to. Systems should be forced to send you an initial approval/subscribe email to begin with. This alone would help reduce all of the email I get for other people who mistakingly use my email as theirs.

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Then there are companies that sign you up for multiple marketing lists that need to be unsubscribed from individually. (Yelp, I'm looking at *you*.)

I'm fairly certain that it is impossible to unsubscribe from Nextdoor. They constantly invent new lists and auto subscribe you to them.

I've not seen any Nextdoor emails in quite a while so it must be possible.

Not yelp but I've been down that road with a few companies.

Several EU countries require double opt-in (i.e. you have to confirm the opt-in by clicking a link you receive via e-mail before they can send you additional e-mails). Sounds like this is what you want?

Yes, to some degree. We need better email infrastructure to handle this type of thing. I can see there being situations where it can cause problem or friction.

What I do know is that what we have today is an absolute mess and it's horribly inefficient.

I think the ideal solution would be if it wasn't essentially free to send an email (meaning there is no incentive to not spam). If it cost $0.01 to send an email it would have no impact on normal people and businesses, but it would dramatically reduce the amount of untargeted spam.

Requiring a billing infrastructure makes everything hard.

Now I need to charge users before I let them sign up for an account, because if I send them a confirmation mail when they sign up, and then a couple password resets over the years and I've got more than a handful of users, it's going to be real money. Which isn't that hard, but users don't really want to pay $1 to join a forum or whatever.

The bigger problem becomes how do you actually tape a penny to an email? There's a lot of diversity in email providers (even if there's a lot of concentration at the top), and international payment flows are extra fun. Plus, a penny USD is a significant amount of money to people in many less wealthy nations.

And the whole thing is very decentralized, so good luck with adoption.

Absolutely. Contact information is provided with certain expectations of how it will be used. If I provide an email address for the purpose of receiving package tracking updates, it is absolutely unacceptable to use that email address for marketing. If I provide a phone number for 2FA (ignoring all the security flaws in that), it is absolutely unacceptable to use that phone number for marketing.

Misappropriating personal information for unapproved purposes is on the same level as misappropriating credit card numbers for unapproved purchases. Just because an entity has access to information does not mean that they are justified in using that information in any way possible.

This sounds like an awesome idea, and I immediately began musing over the idea of a world in which it was globally illegal to send mass messages anywhere in the world without an initial opt-in.

Sadly, I immediately realized that if such a law was passed, the major email providers would all implement the opt-in check using a web-based system (as opposed to a fundamentally email-based one, on easily argued "convenience" and "accessibility" and "user experience" grounds), and thus achieve vendor lock-in.

In the end it would amount to another form of implicit censorship through badly managed filters and whatnot.

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