Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

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I run webforums, and this is enforced trivially.

I don't send marketing, I only send transactional emails. Notifications are opt-in, and transactional. Logins / signups are done via sending a TOTP to the email, these too are transactional.

If someone marks notifications of new posts in a subscribed thread as spam... fine, but this is self-solving, as this person will trigger no more email ever reaching them for that email address, meaning they also cannot now sign in to the website, and therefore cannot subscribe to more email updates, or visit things to refresh "last viewed", and so would never be notified again.

Emailing a TOTP as a login has increased deliverability by self-selecting the removal of those who hit the spam button. Deliverability of email from the webforums is over 99%.

Reporting email as spam, effectively bans oneself from the website. I didn't even need to do anything.

When you report something as spam to Google they only claim they "might" cause later emails from the same sender to go to your spam folder; regardless, those emails going to one's spam folder doesn't mean they don't get them at all, it just means they have to look at their spam folder to log in.

When you use services like Sendgrid, having a spam report will automatically prevent future emails being deliverable, third parties and intermediaries do this precisely to protect their email reputation.

Marking spam may not be immediately be a death knell within Gmail, Hotmail, etc, but because of the potential impact from being marked as spam, virtually everything treats it like a death knell.

This is fine for me, my service is entirely opt-in, and if someone hits the spam button it risks impacting other users who _want_ the email, so I am not bothered that this person effectively unsubbed themselves and killed their account.

Surely it's not that trivial given

- Gmail might be able to detect what's important and not mark it as spam

- If it gets marked as spam anyway, the user can just open the spam folder to use it

- Even if you have high deliverability, that might not translate to it actually getting into the inbox

I can only share my own numbers: 90K sent, 97.12% delivered, 103.11% clicked (presumably some clicked more than once? or some older emails still being clicked?)

I do not track "opened" / "viewed" as that is not important to me, these are transactional emails, logins or "someone has replied to your conversation".

am I understanding this correctly: When you mark a single email as spam, you will never receive another mail from that sender?

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