Hacker News Reader

Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

If it takes me more than 2-3 seconds to find the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, or if that page is anything other than a confirmation (nobody is forwarding your bullshit, you don't need to "confirm" my email address it's just intentional friction), I just mark it as spam. If I'm feeling generous I might let gmail unsubscribe me, but usually I will explicitly not click that just so I can mark all your emails as spam moving forward.

View on HN

The fun thing about Gmail's "attempt to unsubscribe" is that if you're looking at spam sent to a Google Group, it won't trt to unsubscribe you from the spammer. It'll unsubscribe you from your Google Group.

As we use groups for some SSO auth at work, the thing that tipped me off to this was having my work Dropbox delete itself from my machine. Nearly gave me a heart attack.

Right - but that puts the 'solution' to this problem on your end, and not on the plate of the organisation sending it to you in the first place. Sure, this is the easiest way of dealing with it, but it's not how it should be. If Cloudflare needs more customers, they need to follow the marketing rules, and one of them is to allow users who are not interested in their offer to no longer receive these. The whole "verify your e-mail address" is bad enough and as stated above is nothing more than a barrier to prevent you from unsubscribing...

If you use a provider like Gmail, you're not just solving the problem on your end. Google trains their global spam filter through every user's behavior. So if enough people keep marking Cloudflare mails as spam, they will eventually end up in other people's spam folder by default.

There are some things that I am petty enough about to go out of my way to hurt a bad actor rather than take an easy route which may hurt them less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com