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Comment by ACow_Adonis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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