Hacker News Reader

Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them.

You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself.

Even if it's not required by the letter of the law, you should add it.

As an example: Amazon automatically opted me into an "alert" when a wishlist I viewed had a new viewer. Since it's an "alert" and a "business communication" it has no unsubscribe. This is spam - this is an ad hidden as a notification.

View on HN

"You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself."

What would that even look like ?

You're a paying customer of a service - they charge you every month - and you use that service ~daily ... and then you unsubscribe to emails ...

So then what ?

We just keep taking your money and when the service fails or there is an outage or critical notification we ... just don't send it ?

Yes, just because I use your service doesn't mean I want to see every outage notification status update as an email. Preferably email subscription status would be granular so I can select what I want to get not what some idealized average user would want to get.

I've been a paying customer of rsync's service for more than a decade. The only mail I get is the monthly invoice, and roughly once-per-year notice of infrastructure changes that may temporarily affect availability.

Oh I have no doubts whatsoever the volume is low and the messages sent intended to be genuinely important to the vast majority of customers, rsync seems very reputable based on what I've heard over the years on HN.

It's still nice to have granular subscription though even for rare things you think 95% of users may like to hear about e.g. I've been using a similar service since 2015 and I have 0 interest in receiving their downtime or scheduled maintenance notifications as I don't care enough to take a special action for a failed sync or two in the first place so... I don't opt to receive them and I appreciate that option. I don't get the invoices emailed so I haven't had to think about it one way or the other there.

Yes. I explicitly told you I didn’t want any emails from you.

That is gonna lead to all kinds of misunderstandings and complaints.

If I unsubscribed that already told you I didn’t want you sending me emails. Your attitude is the very reason I use “Hide My Email”.

Surely 99.9% of your users have a backup system that could recover from a day-long outage on your end without any manual intervention?

What are they supposed to do in response to an outage notification, apart from wait for things to recover on their own?

~rsync runs a storage service for offsite backups. You think they should add a one-click "unsubscribe" link to service alerts?

if the service is managed: customers should be able to manage notification preferences tailored to the severity of the issue, methinks.

That's not how unsubscribe links are supposed to work.

Once the unsubscribe is activated -- and it's supposed to be very easy to activate -- then it's permanent. There's no "un-unsubscribe", "oops I clicked it again", "some other service glitched and clicked it for me".

Further, there's a distinction made between "commercial" and "transactional" messages in both law and etiquette. The unsubscribe link is expected in commercial messages, not transactional ones.

Abusix didn't know what they were talking about.

> Further, there's a distinction made between "commercial" and "transactional" messages in both law and etiquette. The unsubscribe link is expected in commercial messages, not transactional ones.

Most of the junk that gets through my spam filter are transactional or other "mandatory" messages intended for someone who fat fingered their email address. If those senders don't want to be marked as spam, they need to provide a way for me to make the messages stop.

Email confirmations should be standard but that's not what we're talking about here (and I'd expect that ~rsync is handling that properly).

Unsubscribing from transactional emails eventually causes the following support conversation: "Hi, uhh, rsync? Yeah, so, I'm having trouble logging in to my account and we really really need our backups, our intern just nuked a database. Yeah, it's uhh... cto@company.com. What do you mean my account's not active? ... ... Why didn't you just tell me my card expired? Well yeah, of course I unsubscribed, but I still wanted to know my account was being shut down!"

There's a scale of headaches happening here. At one end of the scale we have "nuisance", as in, "I'm getting too much email, or I have a stupid email address, or I don't know how to filter messages from reputable senders", and at the other end we have "job-ending cockup", as in, "I'm just now finding out that a critical part of our disaster recovery plan hasn't been working for a long time because somebody somewhere was inconvenienced by a notification, and I'm finding this out now because today happens to be the day we really need that disaster recovery plan".

Pushing the needle away from the nuisance end moves it closer to the disaster end.

The service is not meant to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you unsubscribe from critical notifications and get screwed over.. that is on you.

It is not fair to the rest of us to be inundated with endless spam just so some screwup can be kept from doing something stupid.

Transactional email from a backup service you deliberately signed up to isn’t spam, so congratulations you’ve got what you’re after.

Now someone will likely reply shifting the definition of what “spam” is to include Rsync’s critical service emails, and now the term spam is so wide as to be meaningless.

At that point it’s on you to manage your own spam filter if you truly feel “your critical backup service is down” is spam. I haven’t been inundated with endless spam for about a decade.

Abusix don’t know what they are talking about, and basically all services that let you manage your email notifications still send through critical “your service is about to be turned off because your card details failed” emails regardless of how many checkboxes you disable — and for good reason.

I got dogpiled on here a couple weeks ago for the temerity to suggest that "spam" is, by definition, unsolicited. Unreasonable people like this put companies in no-win situations.

I did not solicit emails from that service.

I solicited them to store my data.

Did you solicit every nag and advert Amazon sends you?

That you bought something from someone does not mean your email inbox is now free game.

Fine then. Filter them client side. That’s your choice, don’t make the choice for others.

You can always login and re-enable an email on the service. The service is allowed to request information needed to process the unsubscribe.

I get emails for some dude's Chevy when it needs servicing. I can't unsubscribe. I am stuck getting emails about a car I have never owned from some dealer in Pittsburg. I need an opt out that lets me communocate "hey, some dumbass fatfingered his email, stop spamming me."

Genuine question: your comment and a bunch of others make me wonder why people seem unable to filter email by sender. That used to be a pretty standard part of having an inbox. Are you using a mail client or service that doesn't have filtering built in? Do you find it difficult to set up a filter rule? Are you unfamiliar with filter rules? Do you use filters but just ideologically object to any unwanted email?

I'm honestly curious.

The conversations about spam are usually incredibly nebulous, as there's different perceptions and perspectives.

I think what you're picking up on, is that some folks don't differentiate between commercial email filtering services, and personal spam filters.

There's conflation of email 'I don't care about and don't want', bulk UCE, shifty list operators with shifty 40 page terms, etc.

Gmail filters are incapable of marking things as spam. Worse, if something matches a filter rule, it's whitelisted.

Well, that's horrible and explains a lot. Thanks.

It's a chore, and it is a never ending one. I have several thousand senders blocked. However,

1. Some senders intentionally send ads and actually useful notifications from the same address, making filtering more difficult

2. Better yet, some senders constantly shift their address so they are almost unblockable without going to arbitrary keyword blocking

I would like to live in a world where instead of me doing stupid amounts of work to not get a flood of spam.. people just don't spam.

I am lucky - I can literally throw money and tech at this problem. Most people are not lucky. I would much rather spam be elimited as a whole.

For rsync however, it seems more likely that it's instead things like disc quota or expiring service.

At least based on my understanding of rsync-the-company and rsync-the-hn-commenter.

Though that may be a nice opinion, your ISP has no business dictating that to you.

Abusix isn't their ISP, they're an email blocklist provider. Telling people what they need to do to not get blocked for being abusive is literally their job.

yea, in an ideal world, the blocklist provider would educate others in how to avoid beeing blocklisted. yet, if this course is met with success then the blocklist provider is out of business.

there seems to be some conflict of interest here.

Please see my comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30227886 and the subsequent threads below.

Not all blocklist providers are the same.

terribly sorry that you felt personally implicated, that was not my intent.

thou every security-for-profit scheme suffers from afromentioned conflict of interest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com