My biggest current peeve is not allowing me to see shipping costs until I’ve given basically all my information to a company before I’ve checked out.
Couple of days later the company CEO emails me back. First he apologises (bonus points to a Canadian), promises to fix the cart abandon logic, and offers to ship me 2 of the things I was going to buy for free.
They will hopefully arrive this week
Far too many businesses are being run by people completely out of the loop.
Emails, especially from the CEO, are legally binding.
And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense for you to pay $50 for shipping.
But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I didn't.
This one is paid, but I’m at the point where $140 for 3 years “standard” package is fine by me. Not to mention I can actually call someone if I have a problem, instead of getting blocked by google for no particular reason without any recourse. I don’t have a huge social media following that can get me special treatment.
There may possibly be free options that allow you to proxy/mask emails, but I’ve not explored that.
Another useful service is privacy.com, which in a similar manner let’s me create proxy virtual payment cards, setting limits and redacting cards. This kills the possibility of a malicious business like a telecom still charging me for something and having the bank still allow it to go through when they shouldn’t. Now my credit union is pretty good so far, but there are a lot of banks that will happily fuck someone over without a care.
It’s nice having no mean _No_
I know I should probably get off of gmail, but it's a really good service for my needs.
It's also reasonably priced and there's no limit for those email addresses since it just captures every email sent to my domain.
Downside is I can't send from those addresses but that's generally okay for me.
Now I just mark any marketing email as spam and let the email service automatically move all future emails to spam.
Proton has SimpleLogin after buying it, but then they own me forever as much as the next company, with the caveat that they can raise fees. Just your username and (ridiculously crazy, 26 character) password isn’t good enough anymore-“oops, we need to send you an email before you can log in” is rapidly becoming normal.
I do something like that too, but I have my own SMTP server. It doesn't use + it is just an entirely different email address for each one.
I can also easily send from any address by the -r switch.
Fastmail offers this feature, and I think 1password might. The `+` tag should be possible with any provider, `me+hn@example.com`
Of course now you have to have a way to keep track of what email you gave to what company. I usually do `firstname_company/website@` to make it easier to remember.
Edit: Hit me with the downvotes, I don't mind, but I also enjoy hearing about why my perspective might be wrong. From where I sit, I can imagine that plenty of people annoyed by these kinds of email harvesting patterns also don't know enough to employ the kind of method described here. I feel like that's a solution, but not one that can be prescribed to the average joe.
Not at this moment, but we're getting close
More and more often, Safari offers to fill in an anonymized email address for me when I fill out a form.
It's not detected and offered 100% off the time, but is improving.
Even my wife has started using it, and she is not a techie.
You can explain this feature of gmail/fastmail to a reasonably technical person in 5 minutes, where 'reasonably technical' means that the person understands the concept of mail folders. Sure, it might not work that easy for your grandma, but I'm reasonably certain that most people in the developed under 40 fall in that category.
You can get a tad fancier and automatically mark mails without + as spam (only works for new addresses, obviously) or use a dash as separator (if your mail provider supports it). This won't block a targeted attack, yes, but it's usually sufficient to filter a lot of low quality spam and to identify companies that sell or leak your data.
Sure, stripping out everything after the + isn't specified in the RFCs, but I know of zero public email providers that allow + in email address AND treats them as separate address (eg. foo+bar@example.com is a different account than foo+baz@example.com).
>You can get a tad fancier and automatically mark mails without + as spam (only works for new addresses, obviously)
Sites that reject + in email address preclude you from doing that.
I cancelled Prime about a year ago - delivery sucks at my location with their logistics and I just don't want to deal with it. I still occasionally order some things that are hard to find elsewhere, I just ship it to an address where things won't be immediately stolen.
And after the huge "subscribe prime" interstitial with the tiny "not now" button, they still add prime to the order, not as a regular line-item, but as something you have to hunt around for to remove. They're cramming, just like telecom used to.
Amazon is awful if you have the temerity to fail to tithe them as they believe they are due. Fuck them.
Granted, Amazon has much less need for that endless stream of marketing email because they're already the de facto first choice shop. It's a lose-lose game if you're a conscious consumer and both want to support a non-Amazon monoculture for internet retail but also don't want to have to yet another drip feed of marketing email.
Ideally there'd be competition among email service providers to recognize the modern landscape of CAN-SPAM compliant but entirely unsolicited and unwanted email and provide user tools that aggressively bin non-transactional email and penalize senders that send 10 "transactional" emails for a single interaction ("here's your confirmation! here's a shipping update! here's another shipping update! are you satisfied with your purchase? leave a review!) as shadow marketing.
Either they're knowingly doing this for brand reinforcement reasons or are honestly clueless and don't recognize that a single email that links to a continuously-updated order status page is preferable. I figure mostly the former, but either way there are limited mechanisms to encourage vendors to make judicious use of email.