I have passed this on to our marketing team. Sorry you are having difficulty unsubscribing. In the meantime, feel free to email me (jgc@) from the email that needs to be removed and I will make sure it happens.
Pitting a corp against Google's customer support is a nice revenge.
If reporting the email as spam is quicker than unsubscribing, that's what I do.
- Logging in
- Clicking between multiple confusing tickboxes of which emails I want to unsubscribe from. Hint: If someone is actually going to the trouble to hit "unsubscribe", the answer is simply all of the bullshit non-critical emails.
- "You've been unsubscribed from Saturday morning emails sent by this particular product manager" ... implying I have to go find where to unsubscribe from all the rest of the damn emails.
But after that, or if any of these things are too onerous, I hit "spam" with a vengeance on. every. single. email. I get from that company ever again.
That said, I actually never got any Cloudflare spam at all, which is impressive.
For my personal email I run my own mail server, create a unique address for each vendor and ban the address if it is abused.
If keyboard shortcuts are enabled, '!' is mapped to "Report as spam". I don't recall whether the status popover that appears at the bottom of the UI has an "Undo" link, though...
You have to:
1. click on the email from the inbox
2. click on the three-dot hamburger menu on the far right of the sender line
3. click on the 'Block "Evil Sender"' entry in the popup menu
4. confirm that you do in fact want to stop receiving spam from the spammer by clicking the "Block" button
5. Click the "Move to spam" button in the dialog box that appears
I do the same and it's immensely useful!
I find it's also a great indicator of how well that vendor protects my info... if there's a sudden surge of spam to an address only that vendor knows, there's a chance they leaked/sold my info and I know it's time to change passwords and/or reassess my relationship with the vendor.
Because it's trying to avoid accepting any responsibility for a problem that is quite clearly Cloudflare's intentional doing.
However I also think the previous commenter has a point - "we're sorry you're having trouble and we're looking into it" or words to those effect are things anyone who reports issues to big companies hears over and over again and it usually means "we don't give a damn about you and we're not gonna do anything. Suck it, puny human".
For anyone who doesn't recognize you except as a random person who popped up speaking for CloudFlare, it probably seems reasonable to interpret your words as corporate weasel speak, especially on a post accusing your company of potentially illegal behavior. Even if you didn't mean it that way and this does turn out to be an honest and temporary mistake.
Do not criticize those who USE it. It is a symptom of a larger problem.
Rather, criticize people (like many in this thread) who say "you should sue" in response to any problem you have with a corporation. That litigiousness is what makes corporate weasel speak necessary. If the result of acting like a human and saying "oh, my bad" is to get sued (and have a slam dunk case, because they admitted to it!), then people are going to stop saying "my bad" and start saying "that sucks".
This is a cultural choice that we make in the US, and the choice is made in places like this thread. If you want to change it, start here and shame those who say "sue!" after a person encounters a bug trying to unsubscribe.
Or we can all continue to assume that everything is malicious, everyone is in on it, and there are no good people. And we'll continue to get a lot of corporate weasel speak. And we'll deserve it.
I do not think when you said "you are having difficulty" that you implied it was the users fault.
I don't think you can really know that. It's the sort of thing that would be very easy to slip through testing (or that a lower-level employee could slip through unapproved), and lots of companies don't pay as much attention to the technical side of their marketing operations as they do their main product tech.
> Because it's trying to avoid accepting any responsibility
I would argue the opposite. If you are not taking responsibility then you shouldn't use the word "Sorry" as it actually implies that it was your fault. You ought to use "I regret" in those cases - there's a blog post on this floating around somewhere.
There is one key thing to keep in mind for those advancing uncharitable critiques of JGC and Cloudflare. It is entirely plausible that JGC is well-intentioned. Yet, Cloudflare has had to hire quite a few people recently.
There may not necessarily be a culture fit. Some new marketing hires may have thought that this dark pattern was fair game. And JGC can strongly disagree without really being aware of this dark pattern. Those two things can hold at the same time.
Sorry you are offended by that characterization.
"Weasel phrases" are non-apologies. A simple non-apology is something like, "I'm sorry you are feeling that way". Let's say Bob wrecks Alice's car after coming back from the bar last night. When Alice wakes up, she notices the car is wrecked and she will be unable to take a client out for lunch in it. Alice becomes angry at Bob as a result and indicates he is responsible for wrecking the car and not telling her the night before, so she could get another car to drive. Alice would want a resolution, either in the moment (Bob giving Alice another car) or an assurance that it won't happen again (a real apology accepting responsibility). An "I'm sorry you are feeling this way" from Bob becomes the non-acknowledgment of the actual cause of the emotional output from Alice. Instead, it deflects back to Alice for resolve. This is tedious, at best.
A good tip for Bob avoiding these "you statements"[1] is to leave out "you" as the object of his stated emotional output. Instead, Bob could say "I hear you are feeling sad and angry because I had a wreck and came home last night and went straight to bed without telling you". This comment from Bob becomes a non-you statement by splitting on the "because" and the "without". There exists a separate acknowledgement of the emotional output from Alice, "I hear you are feeling sad and angry" and an acceptance of the action and result, "I wrecked your car and didn't tell you about it."
It is my opinion you get a lot of these types of comments in public forums, where the conversation is a matter of public record. When given the choice between leaving a public trace of "We were the cause of your difficulty...we'll fix you up though." vs. "We hear you are having issues...", I do think companies will tend to do the later, waiting to give the more specific comment to the recipient outside the public view. Maybe our tendency to think we need these comments aired in public is some sort of error in our reassignment of another's emotions. Their emotional output isn't ours, but we may have empathy for it.
As others have mentioned, the comment comes from someone who seems to care about these things, so if Alice trusts Bob, she'll let the comment slide knowing he'll come through for her in the future.
"That's valid, we'll fix this"?
Properly handling opt-outs is part of it. MailChimp does the right thing by soliciting feedback, including the option "I never signed up for these emails", hopefully that goes into whatever scoring mechanism they use to kick out abusive customers. Sadly the current state of what passes for front-end development is abysmal, with pages often not working if a user has cookies or javascript disabled, or an ad-blocker.
As for JGC, he deserves credit for doing the right thing, but that does not change the fact his company violated the law, and their marketing department richly deserves any fire and brimstone is raining down their necks right now. I would say most companies should probably have their email service provider contracts controlled by legal rather than marketing, most marketing departments have an inherent conflict of interest in this regard.
It’s the exact same bs as using someone’s contact list to spam them with farmville.
Marketers have no respect for their audience whatsoever.
Cloudflare is awesome.
It helps that cloudflare isn't too big to fail yet and still trying to get better.
Hopefully they'll fix this email situation.
In the words of a limbo competition judge, "that's not a high bar".
His response here was perfectly adequate and beyond what the CTO of almost any other large tech company would ever do. Not that it deserves unbridled praise and admiration or something, but the immediate attacks and "weasel word" accusations from others are really weird. HN is way too cynical, sometimes.
I had read somewhere that Gitlab does the same. They have a "How to respond discussions on Hackernews." or something in that line.
Regarding GitLab, it[1] was discussed here[2].
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
(The "sorry" further makes it sound more like talking down. Have you noticed how in a hierarchy the bosses are the ones usually saying "thank you" and "sorry"?)
The correct phrasing is "it is clear to me our system is broken [for you], let me …".
Edited to address the "sorry", it is easy to slip it in without thinking. I'm sure CF rep here did not use that phrasing intentionally either.
There is no excuse whatsoever for requiring someone clicking a link in an email you sent them, to verify their address with you (by clicking a link you sent them.) OP is right, you're engaged in dark pattern techniques and you know damn well that you're doing it.
OP: don't give him a pass. Sue him under the CAN-SPAM act.