Man I wish no private corp was allowed to contact you without an opt-in. Would really make email useful again....
Then, later I placed an order, and during credit card checks I noticed a "Tick here if you do NOT want our newsletter", which was of course unchecked and that's how the fuckers got me.
Fuck this dark pattern, and fuck the Product Manager that requested it. There literally should be a law that says you cannot ask a user to check a box NOT to give away their data.
They later deleted my account, and had apparently only notified me via SMS using the same marketing account (and no other channels).
Same thing with crying wolf and all that.
It doesn't matter to those people whether there was a quick and easy way to unsubscribe or change preferences. It doesn't matter to those people that they actively requested that kind of mail a few months ago and have forgotten. It doesn't matter to those people that they might end up blocking important messages they do want later. It doesn't even matter to those people that they're flagging information that is required by law to be provided to them. There is no nuance here. Got mail. Hit "spam". Done.
Some of these people even think that marking the transactional "thanks for your payment" mail as spam will somehow end their subscription to your service or get them out of a long-term contract early! Then they'll issue a chargeback that is also totally inappropriate and in violation of contract and claim that they gave notice to cancel by "unsubscribing" from the emails by marking them as spam.
Dealing with customer support for those people is not fun. In a perfect world it would go both ways and we could have a system that notified us of such behaviour immediately so we could choose not to do business with those people in the future. It is as sure an indicator of a customer who is not worth the trouble as I have ever found after people attempting actually criminal behaviour.
Spam is a difficult problem. Obviously a lot of senders really are abusing the recipients in ways that are not welcome and should ideally be stopped. But there are plenty of recipients abusing the senders of legitimate messages too.
I'd agree if this was the edge-case, but the truth is that most businesses tend to lean towards sending more email than they need to, so overzealous use of the spam button is an expected reaction in response.
> which for online email services is likely to affect future processing of mail from related sources for themselves and potentially for others as well.
That's the system working as designed - if in aggregate most people signal that they don't want to receive a certain piece of mail or all mail from a certain sender, chances are I will agree with their decision.
> But there are plenty of recipients abusing the senders of legitimate messages too.
I'll be happy to change my mind once email becomes strictly opt-in and senders would err on the side of caution and the default is no email at all and you must explicitly opt into every distinct category of email, with the opt-in being located in the same annoying and hard-to-reach places as the opt-outs currently are.
That's not (yet?) the case, suggesting the spam button isn't being pressed enough. You're trying to guilt people about liberal use of the mark-as-spam button but you seem to have no issues with senders liberally using the "send spam" button.
On the contrary. I dislike spam as much as the next person and I have never allowed my own businesses to engage in "common" practices I consider unacceptable even when that has almost certainly cost us money.
I'm just saying there are two sides to this story and extreme solutions in favour of either one side will probably have undesirable side effects for innocent parties.
There is!
Or one that’s only checked when you fill in your email, but is at the top of the form so you don’t even see it.
Any legal solution will be bypassed before it’s even in place, or of course ignored
The opt-out rule requires that what is wanted to be marketed to a customer is corresponding products or services to what they have bought.
There are four basic conditions to be able to make use of the opportunity to market products without consent to existing customers. All four conditions must be fulfilled, cf. the Marketing Act § 10, subsection 2:
1) During a previous purchase, the customer has himself provided his email to the vendor,
2) The customer must be informed that the email may be used for advertising in the future,
3) The customer must have the opportunity to opt out of email marketing/advertising on it time when the email was disclosed to the vendor, and
4) The customer must have the opportunity to opt out of receiving email marketing at all times subsequent inquiries from the vendor.
"Corresponding products" are defined as:
- It must be products that the vendor itself sells.
- There must be a connection between the first purchase and the subsequent purchases marketed products, but the products do not have to be identical.
- Corresponding "product groups" are covered by the option.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-pr...
The vast majority of them aren’t compliant (the GDPR bans tricking/annoying people into granting consent), but are able to proliferate because it’s not enforced anywhere near enough.
If you get a random sales/marketing email, you have the right to find out where they got your details from and where did they get your consent to email you.
This doesn't matter much when emails are sold and sent from outside the EU/UK. This would probably need to be a protocol-level adjustment to ensure consent before contact.
A legal business targeting people in the EU must still comply with GDPR, hence still have to tell you where they got your data and consent from.
Personally since GDPR got introduced it reduced number of cold calls and emails I receive.
No longer can companies randomly add my email address to their Mailchimp accounts.
And no longer companies can easily sell my data from one to another.
Is it perfect? No. Can it be better? Yes. Did it bring benefits? Yes