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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

> we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under

I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type. (Edit: Also, everything requiring a notification - by e-mail if they couldn't get me to install their app - just to get me to engage with their site.)

Once such behavior has the potential of landing your entire domain in the spam folder, maybe they'll be more careful.

Edit: For example, I can't imagine LinkedIn being able to pull of their "phish people, steal their address book, spam each contact three times with no opt-out" bullshit for so long if strict spam thresholds were in place.

View on HN

Just a perspective from the other side of the coin: I host various services for schools like online registration for parent - teacher conferences. When the platform is live hundreds of parents are logging in, choosing their appointments and have to confirm them via email (only one email per person not per appointment)

And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to. I have correctly configured sfp, dmarc, dkim, reverse dns for the Mailserver and have tested the wording with multiple mail testing services to make sure it doesn't have keywords that get automatically flagged.

And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain"

There is no form, no human to talk to and they just block you.

Angry parents come to me or course because they never redeived the activation link so I had to put up a disclaimer stating that if they should not use a yahoo email address if they have a different one

Why confirm via mail at all?

maybe to confirm that the email is valid?

Correct! With schools and students there is always incentive for shenanigans. If I didn't test for emails they could just book-block all teachers.

There would be other ways to clog the system using trashmail providers but thankfully no student cared enough for that yet

This is a requirement in some jurisdictions (double opt in) for some cases. Not sure about "User has a confirmed email + account at our service, he wants to sign up for a reminder" use case though.

"Double opt-in"is a spammer term for what normal folk refer to as "confirmed opt-in".

I seriously don't get why we can't have some sort of licensing authority for this type of thing. Maybe they issue you a secret key to include in email headers, or put your entire domain on some sort of whitelist. And complaints get handled by a human to confirm that it's not a "oh I don't like this, or I don't remember signing up for this" non-sense complaint that would get you blocked or have your license revoked with a normal provider.

Am I crazy or just missing some super obvious gap with this path?

SMS has something similar to this. You have to honor requests to stop sending or are banned.

You should try starting one. You'd just need to work with every email provider on the planet (including people running personal email servers) and convince them to let you decide for them what is spam or not, get them to implement a massive list of IPs/domains to whitelist on their servers, get them to let you edit that list whenever new mass mailers sign up for your "We're totally not spam" service, and then get them to provide some way for complaints to come back to you so that you can enforce your rules. It'd be a hard sell for mail providers, and it wouldn't solve the spam problem for any messages that aren't sanctioned by your service.

You'd also have to do a lot of work to validate new senders long before they send their first message and you start getting complaints or else you're just letting spammers pay you to completely bypass every mail provider's spam filters until they finally get blocked and have to create a new account with you under a different company name.

If you can convince everyone to trust you, and your service, and that it'd be worth it for mail providers to do all that work on their end on top of everything they're doing currently to prevent spam, it really could improve deliverability.

> You'd just need to work with every email provider

Why would you need to do that? Just work with those that'll pay you for it. The others won't care as they'll just ignore the header.

Would email providers pay for it at all? I suspect it'd be easier to take money from the would-be spammers than to get mail providers to do a bunch of extra work and then pay you for the privilege just so that your clients can send messages that look like spam a little easier.

I suppose that really you'd be able to get a lot of utility by convincing just a handful of very popular email providers (gmail) to trust that your service will never be used to send spam (or that they should let spammers who slip by you right past all of their spam filters). The more email providers you can get to use your service though the more you could charge the mass mailers for guaranteed message delivery.

Such a service could lead to two very bad outcomes though. Parents being told that if they want to get email from the school they'd better sign up for an email account at one of the few supported email providers (gmail) and/or (if it becomes successful) any sender who isn't paying for the privilege of sending email being treated like a spammer.

> I don't remember signing up for this

This is often not a non-sense complaint. A lot of newsletter signups are still via pre-selected checkboxes that are easy to miss.

I have no idea if this still works, and it probably wouldn't work for a school, but 15-20 years ago the way to get Yahoo to stop blocking your emails was to call up your ad rep and say something like "Why the heck should we keep spending $10000/month buying ads on Yahoo when any new customers we get from those ads that use Yahoo email end up pissed off at us and maybe even charge back because it looks like we are completely ignoring them because they don't see our emails????".

That would get you added to a "never block mail from this domain" whitelist that had higher precedence than everything else.

Aka: extortion

What does outward rotation about an axis or fixed point have to do with politely asking corporate overlords to get their shit together?

There is a form and people you can talk to if the form doesn't work. The form should have been mentioned in the reject message but is at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/contact#sender-support-request> though you should first review their information, rules, etc, starting at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/>, and the mailop mailing list at <https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop> is where you can ask for help if the former doesn't suffice that will often result in direct contact with someone at Yahoo! that can get things done or at least give knowledgeable advice.

> And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain"

Scandalous, it's almost as if the established major providers have a financial interest in making it difficult for smaller providers and individuals to send mail using their own domains!

It is - this would be the better antitrust angle to pursue

> And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to.

During the pandemic we had a lot of problems with the confirmation email for our 5000 T.A. in the virtual campus of the university. I had to guess what was happening because I was not part of the administration team, just collecting forwarded messages form the T.A and guessing:

* Gmail: Most of the time it works.

* Yahoo: The server receives a few hundred emails per day and the other are delayed. These were confirmation emails with half an hour tolerance, if they were lucky to pass the next day they were not useful. (After a week the sending server stops retrying.)

* Hotmail: Sometimes the email is received and sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate. (Try sending an email from hotmail to the no-reply address and cross your fingers.)

* Others: No enough data to have a good guess.

> sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate.

Gmail will do this too. Happened a few months ago with a single (important) message from a private individual sender on Hotmail, one unknown to my Google account. The fix was adding the Hotmail address to a Google Contact.

NextDoor is the absolute fucking worst with this. They sign you up to 10+ lists each in over 9+ categories that results in what feels like 100 different "notification types".

Unsubscribing from an email just unsubscribes from that one list. They don't show any other lists or categories (or imply there are more) during this process.

Once you login you are greeted with a multi-page disaster to manually untoggle each of the near 100 list types.

Then when they add new notifications it is auto-on for everyone.

Yes I ran into this the other day when I tried Nextdoor out for the first time. I was actually so in awe of the insane and sociopathic dark pattern that is their email/notification subscription system that I immediately deleted the app. I don’t want to be a user on a platform that treats its users with so little respect.

I did the exact same thing a few days ago. I thought NextDoor would be social media that connects me with my local community. Nope. It’s overwhelmingly “recommend me someone for <service>”, camera footage of shady people or crime reports, and complaints about neighbors. The excessive emails were the final straw that took me from indifference to actively excising NextDoor from my phone.

So if anyone has ideas for connecting with your local community, I’m still looking…

We just have a WhatsApp group...

> camera footage of shady people or crime reports

Which are usually just black people existing or generic "people walking by my house" reports.

> I was actually so in awe of the insane and sociopathic dark pattern that is their email/notification subscription system…

At least it’s on brand. Once you start reading you will be so in awe of the insane and sociopathic people who do the bulk of the posting.

Another for the hall of shame: MyHeritage. They will never, ever stop spamming you if they get your email. Set your language to Chinese and delete your account, now they will spam you in Chinese.

The special award though, must go to Wal-mart. That company doesn't exist in my country. I obviously never interacted with them in any way. I still get their "newsletter", and sure enough, it's authenticated to come from their domain.

Why do you bother fighting to unsubscribe properly with a company like that? I have a rule: I will try 1 time to legitimately unsubscribe, using the normal flow. If you keep sending me email after that, I will mark every email you send as spam and my email provider will stop delivering your mail.

I started doing this years ago after watching a talk by some Gmail devs on how they think of spam. They said they internally - controversially - redefined spam to be any email the user doesn’t want to receive. Well guess what? I don’t want to receive shitty marketing emails after I unsubscribe. If you send them to me, I’ll get you listed as a spammer.

I encourage everyone else to do the same thing. Life is too short to put up with this crap.

I was taking a low-effort apporch of just unsubscribing from emails and newsletters as they came in. I saw a huge decrease in unwanted emails at first but NextDoor kept coming _no matter what_. Finnally in frustration I logged in, did half the above unsubscribing, then just deleted my account instead. I agree.

This should be illegal

If I'm certain I don't know the company, or I know the company but there is no unsubscribe button, it goes straight to Spam, no questions asked.

A decade ago I went to my country's embassy to renew my passport, and they now use my email to subscribe me to the newsletters of any new political party. All unsubscribe links just 404s. Shameful behaviour.

Anything I receive from any of their political candidates goes straight to spam now. The hope is that I am training the spam filter so it marks those as spam for all other users as well.

It's simple really: have clearly visible, working unsubscribe link in the body of the email that doesn't require jumping through hoops, and be from a company I know and use. Otherwise the spam filter learns about it.

There's worse. An unsubscribe link that asks you to submit your email. Few things anger me more, because they went through the trouble of pretending to comply, and a decision was made to make my day more difficult.

That exists for a reason, and it's not nefarious at all.

Lot of people, especially of the older generation, forward all sorts of emails to their friends and family every day. If one person who received a forwarded email doesn't like it and clicks the unsubscribe link, the original recipient (who clearly likes the email enough to forward it around) gets unsubscribed. That's a bug. If you don't like the unfunny newsletter your uncle keeps forwarding you, that's a problem between you and your uncle, not between your uncle and his newsletter!

The email submission form exists to ensure that the person unsubscribing is the person who is actually on the mailing list. It will not prevent an annoyed nephew from deliberately unsubscribing the original recipient, but it will prevent most cases of mistake by third parties.

Similarly, many unsubscribe links require two clicks instead of one, because some email services used to automatically check out every link they found in the body of an email. A one-click link would unsubscribe everyone before they even saw the email. Nowadays we have better protocols and better email scanners, but old industry habits die hard.

There is no "mistake" in wanting to unsubscribe from a mail list. This is just dark pattern to increase friction, whatever scenario they try to come up to justify.

I share your frustration, but there is no evidence that you read the comment you're replying to.

That comment explains that there's a scenario where people can be accidentally unsubscribed in the presence of mail forwarding, and the requirement to enter an email address can patch over this.

Well, you could still pre-fill that field.

Upon re-reading the comment, I understand the scenario now. Thanks for clarifying.

Thankfully I don't have people forwarding emails to me outside of work...

I think you are mostly wrong. OP is complaining they sometimes have to enter their email address - that is absolutely unnecessary make-work.

The page can prompt the email address, and have a simple unsubscribe button. Not perfect, but okay.

Even better, one-click unsubscribe features (e.g. Gmail's App) are presumably set up to work for the current recipient (not the original sender) so the problem is resolved for anyone using an email client with inbuilt unsubscribe.

The forwarding problem is only for html link unsubscribe. Personally I hate trying to play find-the-ubsubscribe-link, so I use the email client feature where possible (which also helps Gmail rate/flag spam).

Mostly I haven't had problems with repeat spammers, except a republican politician (I'm not in the USA so doubly annoying).

Not everyone uses Gmail or a modern email client that understands the one-click List-Unsubscribe protocol, so senders must include an HTML unsubscribe link in the body of the email in order to comply with relevant rules in all jurisdictions. That link, unfortunately, can fall prey to the shenanigans I mentioned above.

I understand the parent's sentiment because we all want to unsubscribe from unwanted emails. But technical standards can't distinguish unwanted emails from business-critical emails. You could legitimately cause someone damages by silently unsubscribing them from an important news feed. (Imagine that you silently unsubscribed an open-source maintainer from all github notifications!) Even worse, this kind of vulnerability disproportionately affects senders who try to follow the rules and make it easier for people to unsubscribe. Spammers don't care and keep spammin'.

Ideally, an email would have both a one-click List-Unsubscribe header and an HTML unsubscribe link in the body. The latter need not be one-click, and in fact, if it's anything remotely important, should not be.

> Imagine that you silently unsubscribed an open-source maintainer from all github notifications!)

Do open-source maintainers forward around their unsubscribe links in practice?

The other problem with email scanners clicking links automatically can be solved without prompting for the email address. One simple solution is: if the link is clicked within a minute or so after sending the email there's a chance the clicker is an automated system. Instead of unsubscribing right away, serve a HTTP POST form with a single "Confirm Unsubscribe" button. Normal users will rarely see the form, automated systems will hesitate to fire off HTTP POST requests.

> The latter need not be one-click, and in fact, if it's anything remotely important, should not be.

It absolutely should be one-click.

Since when are GET requests with side effects a good thing?

> Mostly I haven't had problems with repeat spammers, except a republican politician (I'm not in the USA so doubly annoying).

I’m a republican (also not in the US sense — I want to get rid of the tie to the monarchy) but I also find that republican politicians seem to be really annoying!

They could perhaps pre-fill the email as a middle ground.

Many websites actually do this. It significantly weakens the defense against the forwarding problem because people will blindly click submit. But IMO it's an acceptable compromise for anything not business-critical.

Some people have come up with a trick to hide the unsubscribe link with CSS when it is inside a <blockquote> tag, as in a forwarded email. It doesn't work reliably, though. HTML email is still stuck in the 90s, it's impossible to do anything fancy inside of it. Much easier to send the user to a real web page for an actual transaction.

Email senders are trying to solve a problem no one asked them to solve. Me unsubscribing from emails from my grandma is her problem and eventually someone should/will help her find another way to share. Let's not pretend that email senders care about my grandma.

Email providers autoclicking on links, is the recipient's problem. This is the same flow used for account verification links and yet you do not see them adding an additional step to it.

And then we have the large number of users complaining about this, and yet they feel they simply know better and reserve the right to impose themselves on us?

This decision is purely self serving, let's not pretend otherwise.

Also needing to log in before you can unsubscribe.

Especially if your account is no longer accessible; a problem I had with Uber after changing my phone number. Bombarded with "Uber Eats" spam and no way to unsubscribe without going through some kind of ridiculous process to reactivate the account.

I have that problem with a former utility company that keeps sending updates about the business that I've unsubscribed from multiple times. The one that irks me the most is TP-Link Kasa who has a marketing opt-out in the account creation flow and they still send repetitive spam without honoring the unsubscribe link.

IIRC, CAN-SPAM explicitly says the unsubscribe button needs to be available without logging in. So this would be a violation.

So, who do you contact about that violation?

Here you go: https://www.justice.gov/action-center/report-spam

You can probably guess how effective that is. In practice, unless you can get the FTC or a state attorney general to sue an actual company for you, nothing will ever come of it.

I report spam that I'm unable to unsubscribe from to the FTC via their online page[0]. I've never gotten any response but it does seem to work. I've been dropped from several marketing lists after reporting them to the FTC, and it's unlikely that these marketers decided on their own to remove me from their lists.

[0] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/

Or needing to enable javascript to unsubscribe.

Hulu did (does?) this and the form rejected my email address as invalid because the domain portion had three parts to it. Of course, they were able to continue sending me emails so some system knew it was valid. It was likely a bad assumption an engineer made somewhere, but all the more reason to use unsubscribe links that are already tied to the email address.

> I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type.

Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. It can even end up getting you more spam (as you've noticed), and what looks like an innocent unsubscribe link can actually take you to a malicious website instead. You've really got nothing to gain by touching spam at all.

The best way to deal with the spam that makes it into your inbox, especially spam that comes from specific senders with predictable subject lines/body content like newsletters, is filtering. For example, just auto-delete anything from a domain you never want to hear from again. You never see it, and you leave them spending at least a little time/effort shouting uselessly into the void.

I tend not to auto-delete directly, but have things filtered into specific folders just in case. It takes almost no time to clear out when they get very full. Most filters are set once and forget.

>Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. It can even end up getting you more spam (as you've noticed), and what looks like an innocent unsubscribe link can actually take you to a malicious website instead.

Yet there are people here on HN telling us that we have some kind of responsibility to watch ads, not block them, and support the kind of people who do this slimy, evil, unethical bullshit.

>Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages.

This only applies to scam emails like newsletters from sketchy domains that you never signed up for, which are sent out specifically to find active email addresses. For those, clicking the "unsubscribe" link is indeed counterproductive.

For actual businesses like Linkedin though, it makes more sense than not to unsubscribe from unwanted emails anytime they're sent. On occasion you'll find yourself back on a different newsletter list, but it's relatively rare and more often than not just incompetence rather than malice; legitimate companies want to send their emails out to people who buy stuff, not people who mark them as spam and lower their reputation.

> For actual businesses like Linkedin though, it makes more sense than not to unsubscribe from unwanted emails anytime they're sent.

Why? What's in it for you?

You filter them = never see the spam they send you again

You unsubscribe = pray that it's not a phishing email disguised as linkedin spam, hope that if it's real they don't just start sending you different spam, and that maybe they haven't agreed to sell your (now confirmed as more valuable) email address to 3rd parties (aka, their "partners") now that you've made that email address worthless to them otherwise.

The absolute most you can ever hope for in the "unsubscribe" case has the exact same outcome as the "filter" case, while the filter case has less risk and as a bonus lets the spammers waste their time.

At mailpass.io we tried to embed some of these ideas straight away. Easy to ignore certain domains. Easy to delete all messages from a specific domain without sending any kind of tracking this was done

Interacted with the company, as in filed a support request, bought something from them, etc.

They already have my e-mail address, likely even verified. They're also somewhat normal companies, i.e. they have an address where the local DPA can send a friendly reminder, and while they will happily pass your (likely hashed) e-mail address to Facebook for ad targeting, actual selling to spammers is incredibly rare.

I often can't just filter the domain because I might actually need to deal with the company again (if I boycotted everyone who acts like a dick I'd be living in a cave).

Also, for many, unsubscribe actually works.

> I hope they make it really strict.

The threshold is "spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%".

That sounds pretty low to me, but I'm not in the bulk email business. I guess maybe a very small number of users actually report spam? Or maybe Google is being strict.

Source: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequir...

(I work for Google, but on something totally unrelated, and don't speak for them or have any inside knowledge.)

One of the key problems is that both gmail and Yahoo UIs actively encourage users to report messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. Yahoo is particularly bad at this; it's common for me to receive spam reports from yahoo on an entirely double-opt-in social site I run. My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages. Hotmail/outlook/live is much the same in encouraging spam reporting over unsubscribe, however, their penalties are not as excessive as Yahoo's.

> One of the key problems is that both gmail and Yahoo UIs actively encourage users to report messages as spam rather than unsubscribing.

I think this is, generally, the correct approach. There isn't really a salient reason to discriminate between "email I don't want from someone I don't know" ("true spam", if you will), and "email I don't want from someone I do know" (aggressive newsletter campaigns et al). Spam is the button to send a signal that you got an email you didn't want.

> My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages.

This is the system working as intended to me, as the customer of the email service. I like that my email provider is throwing their weight around to put the fear of God into bulk senders and forcing them to think about how this campaign will impact their sendability. I would much rather annoy the hell out of bulk senders than cede emails to spammers like we have with phones.

There is one case where differentiating makes sense: Sometimes users sign up for newsletters, want the newsletters, would re-confirm if asked... and later change their mind and no longer want those newsletters. Here, marking as spam is unreasonable.

In most other cases (e.g. newsletters sent based on a tiny pre-checked checkbox or without asking for consent), the spam button is of course the right tool.

> My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense

Sounds like it's working as intended.

The worst offenders are those without a link to unsubscribe, and who instead ask you to "reply unsubscribe", which happily for them is also a signal to the email provider that you've interacted with them and therefore are not spam.

> I hope they make it really strict.

I hope they not. Gmail spam filter is far from being perfect and classifies many non spam messages/senders as spam. May be because they heavily rely on user reports (to train AI?) and email users tend to report all kind of emails as spam including clearly ham messages like bank statements, appointment notifications, password reset emails e.t.c.

Even gmail's own marketing messages (that I never asked for!) end up in my spam folder. If google can't even reliably send emails to themselves I don't know how they expect anyone else to succeed.

Nextdoor is the absolute worst about this. Selecting unsubscribe only lets you unsubscribe from the "type" of email they're sending you. After unsubscribing 7 or 8 times I just reported the whole domain as spam and blocked it.

You have much more patience than I. After the second email type I deleted my account.

I wish Apple Hide My Email features existed 20 years ago. Any new signup now is I use hide my email.

I use fastmail masked email (which is basically the same thing) with the firefox plugin. I love it.

It gets better when you have your own domain and you can register with throwaways using spamco@mydomain.

I've started doing this about a year ago, but I haven't nailed down an easy way to blacklist addresses from my catch-all. Do you know of a painless way to do that?

Don't use a catch-all. List specific allowed addresses, and remove them (after reporting) if they become spam sources.

In fastmail, rules for specific addresses take priority over catchalls. So if I have a catchall and tell it to bounce emails to spamco@, the bounce rule applies properly.

I share my domain with my parents, so I use my_name@XXX.my_domain.tld instead, whereas XXX is replaced by the service I sub to. That gets routed to my inbox and I have some server rules that sort them in sub-dirs.

For more shady stuff I have some throwaway mail at some free mail provider.

What is the add on name?

What do you do about accounts where you need to log in on different devices? This is where I end up leaving it at the door.

i can't be the only oldskool person on hacker news who knows not to click on unsubscribe buttons because it just identifies you as a legitimate email/mark...

these are spammers, not cases where you ever actually signed up to some kind of legitimate newsletter or discussion group. to pretend good faith is your first mistake...

That's the case for spam sent by illegitimate parties (actual spammers), but any real company (what OP is referring to) will respect the unsubscribe button because they're at risk of being sued otherwise. Clicking unsubscribe in those cases actually does work & doesn't put you at risk of anything.

I get spam from legitimate companies who don't honor the unsubscribe links. The problem is that many of them use third-party services to handle the unsubscription server so you're feeding the data broker ecosystem with confirmation that you're an active address.

This is an irrational reason. When you click “mark as spam” the sender can configure the email so your email provider notifies them that you marked it as spam. (See email feedback loop).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)

Further, pixels can be embedded in the email so they can see when you open the email and how many times.

The sender has every incentive to properly handle unsubscribe to avoid spam traps. If you get big enough, users WILL come sign up for your service with a known spam trap email. If your operations are as sloppy as you’re suggesting, your email sending capabilities go poof.

> they're at risk of being sued

I think this risk is overstated. Individual spam recipients in the United States have no standing to sue under CAN-SPAM; only the FTC does, and there's a high bar to get their attention.

I find the venn diagram of spammers and "legitimate" companies increasingly overlaps and it's impossible to cleanly differentiate the two.

my university spams me. i bought a torch from olight. they spam me. i get food deliveries. they spam me. i bought some tech. they spam me. i look for real estate they spam me. i get a delivery. they spam me.

it's differentiating between the two that's unrealistic.

I don’t think this is a legitimate concern any more. There’s basically zero value in “confirming” an email address is legitimate. Between all of the data breaches and various other ways to get actual email addresses this isn’t a problem. It’s also so cheap to send email there isn’t an operational cost where you need to optimise for sending only to know addresses.

There is definitely a punitive cost for sending emails that are repeatedly marked as spam though. You also can’t just cycle IPs because a brand new IP with zero sender reputation is treated with almost as much suspicion by the big player as one that is known to be a spammer.

It’s much better to give people an option to opt out, and to honour it. Most of the email sending providers (e.g., SendGrid, mailchimp, etc) force you to include the link and automatically block future sending to that address. Some will even provide you the option to provide a reason, where you can specify “I did not sign up for this” which in sufficient number will flag the sender account. I suspect the vast majority of cases where people unsubscribe but continue to get email is actually some incompetence from not having multiple disparate email systems sync back to a shared do not contact list (rather each system is maintaining its own).

Click the unsubscribe button.

there's a line in the movie the incredibles where robert (the hero) is meeting with the designer (edna) of super suits to design him a new suit even though such activities are technically illegal.

The dialogue goes something like this:

robert: you know I'm retired from hero work.

Edna:As am I, Robert, yet here we are.

so now it's 2023. you're telling me it's now safe to click on unsubscribe to the spam emails.

yet here we are.

no, the strait forward response is to ignore and mark as spam any unsolicited emails you did not explicitly sign up for. don't try to interact through the desired or expected channels of any entity that spams you.

When you mark an email as spam, the mailing service emails the sender along with all the original headers. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)

Your reasons are not actually rational.

surely this depends on the actual mail provider you use.

i appreciate its impossible to prove a negative (everyone could be doing something they have no evidence or documentation of doing), but given my mail provider both says that you have to mark a selection before they'll share such information with partners and that marking emails as spam still trains your own user specific spam filter, i don't think (and an really hoping) this is not a universal thing.

It’s universal as far as I know.

I worked on an email system that sent billions of emails a month. We used these messages from providers to ensure we never sent them an email again to prevent hurting our reputation. (Marking an email as spam, is by itself, a very low signal on reputation, unless some massive % of recipients mark it as spam. Sending an email to someone who has already indicated you are sending them spam is a high signal that you’re sending spam, however).

It doesn’t even matter when you do it. We had people (outliers) who would go back and hit every single email we sent them for the last 6 years as spam, after a bad customer service interaction, not getting a refund, or whatever pissed them off. We actually investigated all outliers. Most people didn’t report spam on anything older than 6 months.

PINE used to have a Bounce command that was great for faking an invalid email address.

This is exactly why GDPR exists. What you are describing is illegal in the EU. Sending marketing communication requires clear opt in consent.

I just had this experience today. The problem is that at least in the States the regulation is ambiguous enough to be abused to hell and back. Unsubscribe in the States could mean “Unsubscribe from all” or “Unsubscribe from 1 of 20” or it could mean “unsubscribe from all now, but we will arbitrarily resign you up for some new newsletter whenever we feel like it”. I got a spam email today from some no name dropshipper I bought contacts from probably a decade ago, I got LASIK 3 years ago and haven’t needed contacts since.

Some large companies even flagrantly violate the extremely lax rules that exist in the States. Guitar Center has infamously been sending me emails that are in direct violation of the one click unsubscribe regulations for almost a decade now. I can’t even sign in to the account to cancel the emails (which is in direct violation of the regulation- it is ambiguous on a lot of things but the one thing that it isn’t is that you aren’t supposed to be required to log in to opt out of email communications) because it was made with my dad’s email from 20 years ago yet I’m the recipient of the spam.

I did report them; but of course nothing must have happened because they are still doing it.

> unsubscribe from all now, but we will arbitrarily resign you up for some new newsletter whenever we feel like it

The LinkedIn way.

Are you sure? I don't have more than anecdotal data, but I remember unsubscribing from EU newsletters to be much more cumbersome than from US ones.

If it's at all difficult just reply saying something with the 'GDPR' keyword and they'll hop on it.

A few times I've had unsubscribe links absent or not working for whatever reason and done that and a human's replied and sorted it out.

I was recently subscribed to ~500 newsletters within 10 minutes, and the most annoying ones to unsubscribe where from Brasil, US, India, etc.

(An attacker used the paypal guest account feature and used my IBAN [european bank account number] and tried to hide the mail within those hundreds of mails. They were successful for some days, until the purchase showed up on my bank account)

What do you mean, how is there a difference between unsubscribing a newsletter from a EU company than a US company?

This is my experience as well. US emails are one-click unsubscribe almost without fail, while EU and AU especially require multiple clicks and often entering my email address to unsub. Extremely annoying.

I don't know the legality of this in the EU but often it is required that you opt-in to these marketing emails to create an account or do other basic things on a website.

And then there's those online stores that cover the entire page in a popup that you can get a 20% discount code if you give your email. Technically I've opted into their marketing. But I always just use the coupon and then report the email as spam without bothering to unsubscribe.

If you need to opt-in to create an account then it is illegal. Yes the discount code for newsletter signup is a result of GDPR consent requirement along with growth hacking technique popularity that is incredibly annoying.

Referring people by email to the site!

> There is simply no easy way for your users to legally invite their own friends to your site, so it can never reach critical mass.

Referring friends and family by sending emails on your own? Who the fuck does that since ~2010? Ever heard of social media and instant messengers?

Edit: Parent was a wall of text when I responded. Stealth editing it to something completely different is not cool.

It covers instant messengers too. You need to obtain the consent of the person receiving the message, before prefilling the message with the URL and text for their FRIEND to send them. Sorry buddy. That road is closed for you too!

Social media MAY be an exception, but that's because people are already used to receiving a ton of spam on it, so your "viral post" will be ineffective to begin with, and probably filtered by Facebook and not shown to most people at all. Enjoy.

All the original social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used ways to invite others by email (famously in Harvard etc.) So now they are burning the bridges behind them and no one can do it anymore.

Even European Websites do this. I know that in principle I never check the "I want to receive spam" but I still do and still have to unsubscribe later.

Report them to your local DPA. I do not see this so often with big companies but every growth hacking startup send newsletters without consent.

And regularly occurs

Also there are separate email marketing laws.

It’s fair to say any traditional email provider will still struggle to prevent this ‘legit spam’. We took a different approach at mailpass.io where we assume most of the messages are not important for the majority of inbound email. We suggest giving it a go for then forgetting / not caring about whether unsubscribe actually works

The Information are so incredibly bad for this. I've requested unsubscriptions multiple times from them and they just can't seem to manage it. Like, presumably their audience won't use them but still it rankles.

Honestly I prefer to subscribe to those kind of newsletter in the form of a RSS feed. They just publish passively, and I choose when to subscribe and unsubscribe on my own term, and it doesn't clutter my mailbox.

What do you mean? There’s a huge difference between “Product Spotlight” and “Best Deals” /s

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