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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

It’s the threaded conversations that sales people have with themselves, marked as important by gmail, that drives me mad.

“Hi Mark, Just wanted to close the loop today and see if it made sense for us to connect.”

“Hi Mark, I hope you are having a successful week. Did you manage to check on below email?”

“Checking in, Mark - do you have 15 minutes next week to discuss your goals?”

All unsolicited spam and all marked important by gmail. I just ignore most email these days. Seriously. People who know me know how to find me on closed loop systems like WhatsApp, Slack, etc. Gmail sucks.

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Hi Mark, you sound a bit frustrated about it, but it is what it is. Let's touch base and circle back to our discussion when you're ready to take our goals to the next level.

I kill you! ;-)

I put my job title on LinkedIn as something ridiculous so I occasionally get recruiter-spam with such phrases as, "What do you like most about being $COMPANY's Senior Rainbow Starfish?" Now I can be entertained by their clearly insane ramblings.

The crazy thing is that this is a function of CMS applications.

And some of those are infuriating. I had about 3 or 4 people so far spam me, and after 5 or 6 unanswered emails the message is "I noticed you're not answering me. I'm really sorry if I did something that offends you".

Someone even showed me a closed beta of a service like this that uses OpenAI. I'm expecting hilarious results.

Yeah that last one is hilarious. “Oh jeez I’m so sorry I hurt your feelings anonymous spammer friend. Let’s be bros and you can sell me some stuff.”

It is insane that our society considers this sort of thing as "legitimate" for a business to engage in.

Tell me about it!

I think the fact this is just another "option" in an application normalizes it for users of those apps. Companies like Hubspot are not only selling software, they're also doing the marketing training for thousands of companies, so it's in their interest to say that this is entirely normal.

It's similar to how it became normal for company blogs to be full of SEO spam written by underpaid content-farm workers, or even AI now. I mean, is that the kind of thing a company wanted to be associated with its image? I guess it is now... :(

Nowhere near as problematic as the titled problem which has recently included emails (sometimes outgoing!) in known good ongoing threads being sent to Spam!

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