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Comment by berdon | Hacker News Reader

What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this.

My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.

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That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them. Ideally you should just be able to reply to the message and tell them about the error. If there's no way to contact a company, that's a whole different problem, and not really one that would be fixed with unsubscribe links in important email messages.

> That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them.

That implies a level of manual effort on the part of the recipient that's unreasonable. I have no relationship with these companies. They did not verify the email address before starting to send a stream of supposedly transactional messages to it. They should be happy that I'm willing to click unsubscribe when available, because the alternative is to set up a mark-as-spam filtering rule that'll hopefully tank their sender reputation.

Writing them via a contact form begging to be removed is not an option.

Yup. And is this situation the recipient will just mark it as spam. Because to them that's what it is.

In 99% of the cases - there is no recourse. In one instance, I tried replying and they asked me to prove my identity as the customer to cancel the emails.

This, I've had people receiving bank alerts for an account they don't own and they can't be stopped. What these companies lack are customer-centric processes that they've thought through.

Wtf is wrong with putting contact information in the unsubscribe link, or reach out productively on request? Why would you presume somebody clicks it by accident vs. the much more likely case of it being a legitimate request? Are you afraid they really want to cancel your service? Or are you afraid you can't send spam under the guise of transactional messages? Or worse, listen to customers about how best to alert them? Truly ridiculous!

> Wtf is wrong with putting contact information in the unsubscribe link

By law, depending where you are, a unsubscribe link has to be instant. So there can not be an intermediate screen asking for confirmation or showing contact information. Well, you could show contact information, but then the unsubscribe (of in this case service critical mails, thus the service itself) had already happened.

I'm assuming you're referring to the CAN-SPAM Act [1] or equivalent in other jurisdiction [2], but nothing of the sort is implied. The requirement is to make available and process opt-out without charge and promptly (typically in so many days).

It is neither dire nor prevents clarification, nor prescribes a specific experience related to unsubscribe links. It's odd to hear the only options are between receiving messages and having service terminated. That sounds pretty user-hostile tbh.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

[2] https://www.lsoft.com/resources/optinlaws.asp

Oh, interesting! https://www.rapidmail.de/blog/welche-vorgaben-gelten-bei-der... claims the same for Germany. That makes it a bit easier to find a solution.

I have a few hundred dollars worth of gift cards for an Australian store received as gifts over several years.

The company won’t talk to me, and the sender sends a lovely message, but no contact information.

You're expecting that a company incompetent enough to attach unverified email addresses to an account to "correctly" deal with unsubscribing from transactional email? This seems entirely futile and counter-productive to me. (Correctly in scare quotes because I can't fathom what a correct automated unsubscribe would look like in this situation.)

Emails should be confirmed before being used for ongoing communication. Simple as that. It’s easier to get right up front than it is to clutter and confuse in the cases already illustrated.

Sure - but these companies aren't doing that. They're sending emails without any means of preventing it, e.g. spam.

You can create a Gmail filter to delete or archive them automatically and avoid poisoning the spam filter.

If I get continuously get emails sent to me that I did not request and I can't unsubscribe to, then it's spam. Maybe companies should make sure they're not sending emails to the wrong person, because I'm just going to keep marking it as spam when it comes my way.

Exactly. "Poisoning" the spam filter is nothing more than sending an alert back to upstream to deal with it when and where it starts to hurt business. Typically it's the only feedback mechanism taken seriously and thus a service to the community.

But...it is spam? If they don't give the tools necessary to stop the spam (unsubscribe or a link to "received this by mistake") then it's spam - intentional or not.

It's not on me to do their job for them. It costs time and hence money.

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