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> Users do not understand the spam button is meant for spam, not for anything they don't want to receive anymore

Anymore?

I never signed up for any of the commercial email I receive. But Gmail does a good job keeping it out of my primary, so the situation is tolerable.

99.99999% of claims that I asked for an email are lies. In light of that fact, the burden is on the sender to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I asked for what they sent. If they can't prove that in a court of law, they deserve to be marked as spam.

Who said commercial?

I am thinking of the broader case here, as someone who runs various websites/tools for various purposes, quite a few of which can send you email to notify you of when a player you follow uploaded a new level, when the local river is exceptionally low or rising sharply or whatnot, when security updates were applied... you may not care about these anymore and not realize that one is being a nuisance, at least to hobbyist services like mine, by just hitting spam and not using the proper unsubscribe mechanism. In other countries, I can understand why: unsubscribing isn't required to be one-click, and even domestically a lot of companies do not honor the law to the letter.

> Users do not understand the spam button is meant for spam, not for anything they don't want to receive anymore

Users don't want to receive your god damned newsletter. Just stop using email as a marketing channel.

I appreciate email as a marketing channel. I sign up for several newsletters. I read them sometimes. I don't at others. If I find they offer nothing of interest or value to me, I unsubscribe. If I continue receiving emails after unsubscribing, then we have a problem.

I rarely have issues with companies which actually abide by things like the CAN SPAM Act.

What is it with these comments? I'm not sending you a "damned" newsletter, go complain to someone else. Emails from my server are either my personal emails, or from one of various websites/tools which can send you emails, for example to notify you of when a player you chose to follow uploaded a new level, when the local river is exceptionally low or rising sharply or whatnot, when security updates were applied... thing that you asked to receive.

I'm sorry if you're as pissed off about marketing garbage as I am but I am not your problem.

At least to hobbyist services like mine, by hitting spam and not using the proper unsubscribe mechanism on emails that are not spam by any definition, it becomes very hard to run these things and not have a quarter of the people (particularly on google services) complain they don't receive the requested email. They assume the problem lies with me because google couldn't possibly ever make a mistake, they're too big for that and clearly it works for everyone else (yeah, everyone else runs commercial services and either indirectly contracts or employs people whose full-time job it is to make sure that sent emails dance to the tune of a few big providers)

It was because of this line:

> So if someone wants to annoy you, they can sign up for your newsletter

I'm sure you aren't the problem, but in general, every time you do business with any company they sign you up for marketing garbage on an opt-out basis. I personally do actually use the "proper unsubscribe mechanism" on these things but I have absolutely no sympathy for them and I hope Google just decides to unilaterally end this practice.

> Here we go, this is the meat. So if someone wants to annoy you, they can sign up for your newsletter and hit the spam button and everyone will stop receiving all email from your site (such as signup confirmations, password resets... you're basically out of business).

Except everyone already does that and the bar is, presumably, significantly higher than one person.

> the spam button is meant for spam, not for anything they don't want to receive anymore

What you're seeing is that the spam button is meant for spam, i.e. anything they don't want to receive. Trust me, they didn't want to receive it in the first place.

If I had a dime for every crappy company who signed me up for emails without my consent because I had one interaction with their business that involved an email, and then switches their entire "newsletter" infrastructure yearly... I wonder why...

> What you're seeing is that the spam button is meant for spam, i.e. anything they don't want to receive. Trust me, they didn't want to receive it in the first place.

Third reply I read to my comment, third accusation.

What makes you think I am some sort of soulless adfarm person? What in my comment gives you that impression?

Trust me, if you receive an email from my server, you want to read it because: you asked for it. I don't send unsolicited email, I don't run a commercial service. Go complain to someone else if you have a problem with their service, don't blame me for your inbox problems

Then why are you so worried about people clicking spam? If they want to read your email, they're not going to mark your email as spam.

I disagree with your characterization of the spam flagging and that people need to learn how to use it.

If you made it hard for me to unsubscribe, ignore my unsubscribe request, or start spamming me because I did some other business with you and you think that gives you the right to send me marketing emails, I am absolutely clicking that spam button, and I am not wrong.

There is a low bar for what constites spam.

Oh sure, if it's hard to unsubscribe then I will totally use anti-spam mechanisms to block that as well. I am talking about the case where people engage the spam button for email that they (1) can unsubscribe from using the standard one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, and (2) have either explicitly signed up for or that is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and will honor the unsubscription.

Spammers are absolutely not going to care about the unsubscribe link, in fact it will likely put you higher on their list for engaging with the email.

By not understanding this difference, by not 'learning' how to use it as you say, it is very hard for services (e.g. messaging services also struggle with this) to know what is spam and what people newly want to stop receiving.

> is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and will honor the unsubscription.

those are the worst.. If I don't remember subscribing I always mark them as spam, even if there is a big prominent "unsubscribe" button. I'd still be doing that if the unsubsrube was built into UI.

Why? My email got on some list somewhere and now I am getting an emails from various "trusted partners". Sure, there is an unsubscribe button and I would not be surprised if it works _for that sender_ but it has no point as there will be a new sender next week.

Marking everything like this as spam is the only reasonble resort. Yes, this will not save my inbox, but at least it might help the next person.

> > is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and will honor the unsubscription.

> those are the worst

If it's legal in your area to send unsolicited commercial email, obviously that problem is not just going to go away because it gains them a competitive advantage to do so.

> [when m]y email got on some list somewhere and now I am getting an emails from various "trusted partners".

Yea that isn't legal where I live. For me, that would totally fall in the "smash that report-as-spam button" category, so I can very much understand your sentiment

> (1) can unsubscribe from using the standard one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, and (2) have either explicitly signed up for or that is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and will honor the unsubscription.

That's not the bar of spam. Spam existed well before legislation to combat it. Spam is anything that you don't want to receive and weren't asked if you wanted to receive. That includes a wide variety of emails which are legal in most jurisdictions (like the ones GP mentioned).

> have either explicitly signed up for or that is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and will honor the unsubscripti

2 points:

I'd agree that using spam for something a user has signed up for would be unfair, but only in the sense that they understood clearly they were signing up for emails, and not, for example, a confusing opt out tick tied to their purchase. You totally deserve the spam box for that latter one.

Similarly, honouring local requirements for unsubscribe is not enough to get you out of spam reports if you didn't have a reason to email me to begin with. That you have a new product or newsletter or corporate announcement isn't good enough, but many marketing people believe it is. The fact that they can't self police is why I'm ok with email providers being strict about this.

Really the one thing I miss since moving from Gmail is the knowledge that my use of the spam button hurt deliverability for senders of spammy emails more widely than just my own inbox.

> but only in the sense that they understood clearly they were signing up for emails, and not, for example, a confusing opt out tick tied to their purchase

Agree! (With the side note that this is already illegal in my area.)

> Really the one thing I miss since moving from Gmail is the knowledge that my use of the spam button hurt deliverability for senders of spammy emails more widely than just my own inbox.

Agree here, too: a unified list of spammy senders would be nice so we can work together and keep inboxes clean everywhere.

But it should cut both ways.

A sibling comment mentioned they hit the spam button per the definition of "when I do not want to receive the email". That could mean a personal email from their mom that they weren't wanting to read on a sunday, a legitimate invoice for an activity they booked, or literally anything else. Those people should either be banned from influencing a sender's spam score, or at least be ranked 10-100x lower. (Taking this idea one step too far, probably:) We could even tie those email addresses to other services: just ask youtube, discord, HN, reddit, etc. how often flagging/reporting is used as super-downvote button. If those people are registered as willfully misunderstanding the purpose of the button, that frees up a lot of resources and can increase the rate of correct spam detection significantly by having good labeling on data.

> or that is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and will honor the unsubscription.

I think your (luvb1e's) issue is that you don't understand the fundamental definition of SPAM:

SPAM is anything that the sender (not the recipient) defines as SPAM.

For example, a few years ago I bought something from L. L. Bean. In addition to my order confirmation, shipping confirmation, thank you email, surveys, ect, they also automatically put me on their daily email flyer.

All of these emails were legal. Some of the emails were in the "grey area" between legit email and SPAM. The daily email flyer that I never signed up for: 100% SPAM. (And 100% legal.)

Remember: It's my inbox, so I define what I consider SPAM to be SPAM. L. L. Bean can't twist the definition of SPAM so that their SPAM is really something else, and then blame me for hitting the SPAM button.

> It's my inbox, so I define what I consider SPAM

That's like saying: it's my back yard, I'll decide which laws apply here and who can deal drugs here

It's nice to decide on one's own what legislation should look like, but that muddles the detection of real spam. You are signaling to your email provider that this email should never have been sent and that the sender is dishonestly sending garbage around. If the email was legal in your area, I would say the problem lies there, because no amount of spam button pressing will solve the problem if they continue to have a commercial advantage by sending unsolicited commercial email.

> real spam

The daily flyer that I never signed up for is "real spam." It doesn't matter who sends it.

You can't go and say, "oh, we're not spoofing and harvesting so we're not spam." That's just writing your own loophole so you can hijack my inbox and turn it into a billboard.

And remember, I bear the burden of my inbox being full of email that I never subscribed to and will never read. Pushing the spam button has no consequence to me, but hopefully it will trigger consequences for somebody who thinks that my inbox should be their billboard.

It's not my duty to click an unsubscribe button if I didn't subscribe in the first place.

Companies like LinkedIn decide logging in gives them consent to start spamming you. Name a single company besides maybe amazon that if you place an order, they don't automatically put you into their marketing emails?

It's all spam. By definition. I didn't ask for this, you are sending it to me. I don't care how easy you make it for me to stop you from sending it, I shouldn't have been getting it in the first place.

> It's not my duty to click an unsubscribe button if I didn't subscribe in the first place.

Then it's also not your duty to click the spam button??

Joking aside, that's not the kind of email I am talking about. Spam is spam and should be flagged as spam. If you get benign email that complies with all the anti-spam legislation but you just don't want it, then use unsubscribe.

Using the spam button for things that are not spam muddles the data labeling and increases spam rates because the email service operators can't use it to tell what is actually spam and what is a frustrated (or perhaps simply ignorant) user.

I find that I don’t mind _bulk emails_ I mind having a high volume of emails in my inbox.

I’ve gotten a lot of value over the years by having marketing emails in my archive (price history, etc). What I wish gmail did was come up with a really easy system for automatically setting up a “tag and skip inbox” filter for emails.

> What I wish gmail did was come up with a really easy system for automatically setting up a “tag and skip inbox” filter for emails.

They do. It's the whole reason why I use gmail.

When I'm looking at an email that I want to filter, I hit the hamburger menu and select "filter emails like this."

There's also these instructions: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

Yeah, I use that too, but it’s hidden and still a lot harder than “flag as spam”.

>> 2. Enable easy unsubscription

> That has long been required by law. Did they not factor this in yet?!

This isn't generally required by law (but please correct me if I'm wrong; it's been some time since I worked in the email industry.) Requiring this from large senders is going beyond what the law requires.

Not all messages are subject to the laws that do exist around bulk email. For example, under the US CAN-SPAM law, "transactional" messages like purchase or shipping confirmations are not required to have unsubscribe links (even though they may be sent in bulk).

Some classes of bulk email that normal people think of as marketing are also exempt from the law, such as email from political campaigns. There are also gray areas, like transactional messages having a certain amount of marketing content in them.

I also believe the laws pertaining to bulk email do not apply to individual messages sent by a human. A particular email might be lawful for a single person to send individually, even though it might be unlawful for a program to send the same email as part of a bulk campaign.

It's unfortunately and surprisingly difficult to make generalizations about email.

> This isn't generally required by law (but please correct me if I'm wrong; it's been some time since I worked in the email industry.)

I was thinking of commercial, not transactional email at that time. For that, the law that I'm familiar with: https://www.acm.nl/nl/verkoop-aan-consumenten/reclame-en-ver... and I tend to assume that most things that we have in the Netherlands are EU-wide, either in spirit or by being EU-originated legislation. Checking Wikipedia's spam article, four clicks and some ctrl+f'ing later, yes:

> provided that customers clearly and distinctly are given the opportunity to object, free of charge and in an easy manner, to such use of electronic contact details [...] on the occasion of each message

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Came into effect in July 2002

For transactional email, I don't really see the point of unsubscribe links. What's one-click unsubscribe supposed to do when you press it on a StreamSeries invoice, cancel your subscription because they won't be able to invoice you anymore for the streaming service? The only legitimate instance that comes to mind is if a third party filled in your email address and is triggering the emails to annoy you, then unsubscribe could make sense, but that could also just be prevented from happening by doing the (typical) email validation step.

I know of multiple tragedies due to GMail casually junking legitimate emails.

As big a problem as spammers are seemingly indifferent anti-spammers.

It would be amazing if this was an email sent to people describing all of the things that they already had in place like it was a new thing.

Google: Here's our spam email discussing how we protect you from spam.

Me: But why am I seeing this message in my inbox instead of spam?

Google: