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> I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button.

You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much spam I’m not going to try to figure out what is actually spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking “unsubscribe” links in emails I assume are malicious spam anyway. If it looks automated and I don’t know what it is or can’t remember why I’m getting it, it’s spam.

Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign up to receive a marketing email so if I do receive yours it’s either spam or you tricked me into signing up for it, so it’s also spam as far as I’m concerned.

I do this. And what would help (hey google) is if gmail would remember I requested an unsubscribe and then offer to mark as spam 72 after my request to unsubscribe. As of now, I need to remember who all I tried to unsubscribe and when I get their email 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months later, I don't want to remember my unsubscribe list.

I created an “unsubscribed” label for this. I haven’t bothered to automate the rest of the steps you describe but I’m sure it could be done.

Here's the thing. If companies never collected and used email addresses in exchange for providing free webinars, reports, developer seminars, books, reports, etc. they'd do far less of those things because digital marketing would be much more just shouting out into the void with often difficult to measure results. And they'd generally be way out-marketed (and out-sold because marketing brings in leads).

You may be fine with all that but remember that selling pays for engineering salaries.

You’re right. And it’s lead us to a place where I mark most email I get as spam.

> Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign up to receive a marketing email

thats fair, some people do it for the promise of getting some deals, something we actually delivered on often as when we wanted to clear the warehouse we sent discount/clearance emails to the signed up users rather than putting it on the site.

We used to also trial “own produced” products at discounted rates for people as a sort of beta test.

I’ve no doubt that some people do choose to sign up to receive marketing emails.

I don’t, and yet I still do, so I can’t tell what marketing emails are “legitimate” because a website pre-checked a small box I didn’t notice or are simply spam, so it all gets marked spam.

People who mark things as junk mail or spam typically have no idea that this action can have an upstream impact on spam filtering algorithms.

They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works and just assume that the purpose of marking something is spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it, personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that their preference thus exerts a small influence over the experience of potentially millions of other people.

In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users, the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the spam button. But today that definition is something closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I am fairly certain few if any other people are interested in seeing, either."

I disagree with your modern definition. Spam to me is unsolicited commercial emails. All email "ads" are spam. Newsletters I didn't subscribe to are spam. Anything trying to sell me something I didn't subscribe to is spam.

You bet I'm going to mark it as spam and I hope it creates trouble for the sender.

PS: I assume we all agree scams, "Russian singles", chain letters, "little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer", etc, are all spam. That's a shared common ground.

The annoyance I felt that I was a “good” postmaster and I was punished as a part of being from a tribe of bad postmasters.

Google et al. can’t tell the difference when you hit spam.

We never bought or sold any email lists, we went out of our way to ensure you wanted to be on the list- we made it single link with no extra checkbox or button to unsubscribe, we emailed only occasionally and above all we did our absolute best to make the content humorous and engaging.

You can make the case that there should be “no automated mail trying to sell things” and honestly, thats fine, but why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?

> but why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?

I'm someone who often marks receipts for things that were bought as spam. Note that I said things that were bought—not things that I bought.

I have the rare privilege of having an e-mail address which is ${common_first_name}.${non_rare_last_name}@gmail.com, and I am sick and tired of businesses that do no e-mail verification of the addresses of their customers. I will simply delete good old "Click here to confirm your address", but I have no patience for the hundreds of emails I receive because either businesses keep asking customers with my same name who do not understand what email is for their "email address", or because businesses ignore the email confirmation/verification step out of sheer incompetence or out the product-cult of "conversion" rates. Those I mark as spam, because I want them to pay the price.

> why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?

5% seems to be about the noise floor of any human activity. Mistakes, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, mental illnesses. You can’t assume any rhyme or reason for it.

I've heard this referred to as the "lizardman's constant" at 4%. Ie that 4% of people will respond with a trolling, malicious, or simply accidental wrong answer to any given survey question.

> but why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?

I never thought people did that. That's definitely not spam. It is a one-time interaction confirming an operation you just did. Also not spam: when you buy something and the tracking sends you updates via mail.

It happens often, we sell fairly expensive items and regular confirmation and tracking number emails still get reported.

I am certain rising ipv4 prices are dictated by spammers but only availability.

No one likes spam but when you have to send legitimate emails you quickly learn the other side of the problem as well.

I would consider both of these are spam unless the user explicitly asked for it. Not "you bought something" but hitting the "yes, I would live to receive my receipt via e-mail" button. You can always allow the user to retrieve their receipts later on your site by logging in or "accountless" by sending a code to their email. In-person interactions seem to have no issue with buttons for "no receipt, email receipt, print receipt, text receipt."

I agree with you. Outlook gives me the option to classify an email as either spam or phishing. Newsletter I didn't ask to receive? Spam. Newsletter I signed up for but am tired of getting? Unsubscribe. Little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer? Phishing.

Personally, the effort to sell me something doesn't need to be there for me to consider it noise, and where marking something as spam (or phishing) are the only ways to tell the system something is noise, I'll mark stuff as spam even if it's not an advertisement.

Oh we do. We just don't want to have your shitty newsletter.

I also used to work on email at scale (XXX million per day), and even then I encouraged everyone to click spam[1] for any email they did not expect to receive and do not want.

My email address and phone notifications are a direct link to me and are sacred in terms of getting my attention. Yet many companies confuse getting my email address with permission to mail me anything at any frequency. They also believe that "unsubscribe" should be able to redirect me to a website with a bunch of confusing checkboxes. Neither is acceptable.

So, when I click "unsubscribe", that should immediately unsubscribe me forever with no extra efforts, but so many emailers don't do this that I just gave up and started reporting spam.

> emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months

A guess with no info, but it sounds like a case of not removing unengaged recipients, then suddenly getting their attention with a different looking subject line or an email that came at an unexpected time.

If people receive bulk for a long time and they never engage, remove them from the list or pause sending to them to avoid this effect.

[1] - For those who don't know much about email, two things should happen when you click the spam button in Gmail and select "Unsubscribe and report spam" (it's been a while, correct me if this changed):

1) List-Unsubscribe should be triggered and this should unsub you from the list. In 2023, I personally expect this to be immediate and receive no more email but I give senders a window of a day or so.

2) The FBL should give the sender a signal that this specific campaign was considered spam.

Call me crazy, but for a problem folks seem to imply has had everything, including the the kitchen sink thrown at it... why do I have yet to see a single email that has the unsubscribe button at the very top, front and center, the absolute first thing I see?

It is. It literally is.

Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email.

I’m sure you mean the content of the email, but we dont reach out to double opt-in users or transactional emails with an unsubscribe link, since you chose to be there.

The unsubscribe link lives near the bottom of the email along with the link to support, in clear text in a font and colour that matches the content.

Funny, I know to hit the spam button at the top and the unsubscribe bottom buried in a link at the email footer. Am I blind? Have I somehow clicked "spam" and "unsubscribe" hundreds of times without seeing an obvious "unsubscribe" button at the top? Very dubious.

Nope! Just checked Gmail WebView. There is a toolbar at the top with a very prominent"spam" button, and two kebab menus with "filter messages like this", "report spam", "report phishing", but no unsubscribe button.

It only shows up if the email has a List-Unsubscribe header set.

In Gmail it will appear as a banner underneath the row of buttons

>Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email.

I've never seen such a thing. I just checked Thunderbird, on an email that has an unsubscribe link. There was no such button.

I remember seeing that in Gmail years ago, but haven't seen it in a long time. I thought they removed the feature.

I don't mark receipts as spam, but I do delete them without opening them and I really can't blame the people who mark them as spam.

When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in some huge html template and the amount needs to be converted.

When I buy something in a physical store they have the decency to ask if I want a receipt. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for online stores/services to get, ask me if I want a receipt, don't just stick it in my inbox because you have my email address.

> When I buy something in a physical store they have the decency to ask if I want a receipt. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for online stores/services to get, ask me if I want a receipt

2 things though.

1) Your goods arent given to you at point of sale with online transactions.

what happens then if it doesn't show up? tracking numbers aren’t always generated on the fly (it depends mostly on the postal service being used if the site can pre-generate tracking numbers).

2) How do you return the item, if you have no proof of purchase?

You could say “keep it in my account” but then how do we even keep an account for you if we cant even verify your email address for password reset mails?

1) A lot of the things I buy are electronic, so yes, I get them immediately at point of sale.

And if that's not the case then how about asking me if I would like an email with a tracking number when it ships?

2) I have never had to show an email as proof when returning something, usually they know damn well that I bought and paid for it.

In general it seems like you are conflating all the different kinds of email as being one and the same. They are not. I specifically said I don't want receipts by default because they are just spam in the vast majority of cases. I never said anything about email verification emails or shipping emails with tracking numbers.

Edit: I just wanted to add that needing a receipt for a refund is a truly alien concept to me. I can’t even imagine how bad the consumer protection laws are where you live.

Here, even in physical stores we can just give them the card we used to buy the thing and that’s enough to process a refund.

Im not understanding something here.

if you buy something online, IE via an ecommerce site like aliexpress or amazon, how do you get a receipt if you dont have an account.

returning an item requires a receipt in the majority of cases unless the product ships directly with a return label.

Is it even possible to buy anything from those two stores without opening an account?

Nope, not here. If you have to return something then you contact the company and they will verify from their records that you bought it, usually by looking up the purchase by the card you used.

For accounting purposes the bank receipt will rarely have the details needed for tax (eg in Australia that don't include the ABN).

The vast majority of the things I buy don't need receipts to be kept and reported for tax. It's personal stuff like a streaming subscription, a book or a game.

And the times I have tried to claim expenses as work related (in Australia) that I bought online I have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD.

> have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD

Claiming expenses is different to tax requirements. With tax you need the receipt as a record, but the general ledger actually records the amount in whatever currency you use.

For expense claims every company does it differently.

I mean, the few times I have handed a receipt to an accountant to do my tax they have asked me what currency it's in and I have had to go to the bank records to answer that.

Anyway, it's besides the point. The point is that online stores should ask, a tick box would do, as the majority of the time I don't want the receipt and don't need it for anything at all.

How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails?

If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that business I never had any business with starts spamming me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask for permission.

Unfortunately I have a few technology-challenged acquaintances still using my common-ish firslast@ gmail, but once I get them switched over, everything that inbox receives will automatically be marked as spam.

> How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails?

Double opt-in.

You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used to send you an email with a link to click to complete the process.

For transactional email this would be handled by getting people to either create an account or use Paypal for guest checkout. (this was 2012)

>Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam.

i see about the same thing. and i'm purely sending transactional receipts (that is, immediately after purchase. not for subscription or pre-order or something disconnected from the user having just entered their email in the "send my receipt to" field) and for non-trivial amounts (averaging around $100). i can't understand how so many people mark them as spam, and although i have no evidence to support it i have to assume that some poorly-configured firewalls are sending spam reports automatically.

I assume you have transactional and marketing emails coming from separate email addresses. If the email ecosystem made it easier for bulk senders, this would just shift the burden onto recipients.

Right now the common enemy of illegal spammers externalize the costs of their business onto email providers and users. For every dollar they take they impose 100x that in spam filtering costs. >99.9% of raw email traffic is spam.

Blame spammers who offer fake unsubscribe links. Or companies who violate CAN-SPAM by requiring login to unsubscribe instead of one click opt-out. Marking as spam always works.

Was your “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the message in small print or was it a large button labeled “stop emailing me” at the top?

Can confirm. A few years ago and my coworker caught our boss using the spam button instead of delete, even on customer mails discussing (I think) an upcoming project.

He was otherwise highly functional, spoke and wrote fluently in three languages but hadn't noticed the difference between spam and delete.