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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

Quora has this nasty dark pattern where they send you spam e-mail with different senders for each "space". If you simply click on "Block this sender" in your e-mail client, it will not work, since they will send e-mails to you from new addresses. You have to block them at the domain level.

In my opinion, this is extremely user hostile for the sake of improving some metrics.

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My domain-level spam filter has hundreds of domains, started with linkedin.com and facebook.com. These weasels will invent a hundred ways to get into your inbox in spite of turning off all possible mail notifications that exist at that moment.

In the past, I used to use two rules: mark as read and archive. These days I just automatically delete all.

I also get quite aggressive mobile notifications from them.

is it spam email? the unsubscribe link brings me to my email prefences with a single option, on or off.

I’ve found that they ignored any unsubscribe requests and the only way to stop getting multiple emails per day was to create a filter for their domain to my trash box.

Yes, this made me delete my Quora account. The emails are vaguely spammy and despite trying to reduce the frequency, every so often they started a new category of email that you had to independently cancel or block.

I think calling this a "dark pattern" is unnecessarily uncharitable given that you can control per-space email/notifications in your user settings already. Additionally, each space's email takes the form of "<name>-space@quora.com", which is trivial to filter on.

But sometimes the spaces are really weird, like "games-for-vegan-musicians-space" :D

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