Comment by angst_ridden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angst_ridden | Hacker News Reader

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I run a site for a large corporate client. People can sign up to get a quote from a regional dealer for a specific type of complex product. To get a quote, they have to fill out several forms, and select detailed specification, etc, and choose email as the way to deliver the quote.

We regularly have users flag the email they receive from this process as spam.

I have personally called to follow up in some cases to understand if our service was being abused or what the issue was. It was eye-opening. One user said "oh, yeah, I wanted that when I filled out the form but not when I got the email." Several marked the proposal as spam because they didn't like the final quote that was put together from their requirements.

Several said things like "I get too much email" and when pressed as to why they checked the box that said they wanted their quote delivered as an email replied that they didn't know, or they changed their minds, or they didn't want HTML email, or they didn't want a plain-text email, or their name was not in the subject line of the email, or that their company name was not in the subject line of the email.

This is a very low volume, very expensive, highly technical product. We're talking maybe a dozen requests per day nationwide. So those people flagging the emails as spam have a significant impact on the overall deliverability to services like GMail.

Yeah, unfortunately customers can be pretty shitty. We've had a lot of interesting experiences with this and also paid subscriptions - things like significant others accusing us of a massive fraud, soon afterwhich the person who signed up for the service to ask to be reinstated.

That said, if you can get people on the phone, they tend to be much kinder. I think most people think they're just shouting into some empty void.

I think trying to frame "customers mark unwanted email as spam" as a customer problem is just shouting at a river at this point.

How I design my, admittedly not corporate, email delivery system is to require the user explicitly click "Send this to my email" every single time. No email is sent without a user clicking a button painfully explicitly asking for it.

Honestly treating e-mail like sex where it requires enthusiastic continuous consent feels like it should have always been this way. It's really not that hard to have a button and have receipts/tracking to only be on your account page unless they ask for it.

Yeah but like, the guy who mentioned the customers marking emails as spam even though they requested it, did the exact same thing. They consciously solicited a quote and specifically asked for it to be delivered by email, and then for some unknowable reason, marked it as spam despite having completely 100% consented to receiving the email.

> for some unknowable reason, marked it as spam despite having completely 100% consented to receiving the email

Ordinary users aren't very interested in what is and isn't spam (nor are legislators, for that matter). It doesn't help that organisations like DMA lobby to tinker with definations. Unsurprisingly, a large proportion of users think spam is just "email I don't want". So they click on "mark as spam".

I'm not even sure how you would define spam as anything other than "email I don't want" because saying "unsolicited" has been gamed to death.

It's like they're using it as a delete button.

to be fair most people don't know that can get the email sender blacklisted or are simply ignorant of how email works at all other than checking it, answering it, deleting it, or sending it to spam. The sad fact is that a lot are afraid to "unsubscribe" because that is a common trick by fraudsters to get a hit just like allowing images.

thank you for this insight.

i too run a quote service. only transactional emails, things users have requested. and still get flagged.

my favorite so far is when a user complained they weren't getting email and it's because they already blacklisted us so our mail provider diligently didn't send to them anymore.

Why not send those messages through slack, jabber or something like that?

Because no one is using that stuff compared to simple mail.

Are average car dealership customers using jabber?

and how many people use Slack outside work hours? I know I don't. I use discord sometimes, but even that is very niche.

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