The sheer number of comments that think the state of "unsubscribe" is good is... saddening. I should not have to click a link to "unsubscribe" from something that I did not subscribe to. There's no recourse for me against these thieves.
That other problems also exist doesn't mean this solution for this thing isn't good.
The state of Unsubscribe is better than what it was before the laws around it went into effect, but it doesn't go far enough.
There's technical workarounds, too. Like unique emails for each and every service.
I instead used GDPR to request a removal of all my data. That worked.
Exactly! Total scumbags. The way I would frame the feeling for people who don't get it - Imagine coming home from a walk. Your car is gone. Someone left a note on your front door. "Hi, thanks so much for letting me borrow your car! Call me at this number when you want it back!". The manipulative car thief in this example would deny stealing - pointing out they would return the car whenever asked. So you call them and ask for it back, but a bit of your soul dies - to ask for it back is to play along with the ruse that this is what you consented to in the first place. Or at least "would definitely have consented to if available which you weren't". And the loss of control over consent leaves a persistent sense of violation, after all, someone just stole from you and then has the gall to pretend you consented, to your face (or front door).
Perhaps the car borrower-without-permission should have owed up to being a car thief. Perhaps the subscribe-without-permission thieves should own up to being just spammers. The insult of it all is not so much from the random spam, but this manipulative pretend game where we have some spam shitelist LARPing as a reputed newsletter of great public interest - the gall of the spammer to make-believe that you subscribed.
It would all be easily solved if there were civil penalties for it. I'd gladly go after anyone and everyone who pulled this shit as a public service.
No, people should be able to email me as they would normally.
I should be able to block senders, or entire domains. To use a direct example: if I decide that substack is shit because they subscribe people without consent (which is exactly true), then I should be able to block all things from substack and not just a single email address from the domain.
If the spammer is operating within the continental US (or any other country with a reasonable court system), then the spammer should be legally and monetarily liable for the time and money wasted. Everything from the second it takes my server to receive the message, to the second it takes to transmit to my email client, to the multiple seconds it takes me to read the headline and/or body, and the time it takes to press the block button -- the energy costs, the hardware cost, the bandwidth cost, my own time's cost, and the cost of lost confidence in the safety of the internet (just as a thief in your home makes you lose confidence in the safety of your neighborhood) -- all of it should be legally and monetarily liable.
So when that shit substack email puts on a SendGrid or Mailchimp facade, or goes through some Cloudflare or CloudFront or whatever CDN, those "businesses" also get blocked and sued into oblivion because fuck any "business" that doesn't want to own the relationship with their customer, and fuck any "business" whose customer is not the person they're emailing.
So... you want to send me an email? Cool! I hope you will agree that it's legitimate *and wanted*. Because if it's not then I should be able to take you, or your business, to court for wasting my time (and time is money) -- and win on that ground alone.
tl;dr:
Why do I have such a stark view on this, many might ask?
Well let me put it simply: "legitimate" spam is indistinguishable from targeted phishing. So that "unsubscribe" link that people so proudly claim is a great solution? Clicking it does not improve the spam situation and does increase vulnerability to malicious actors. I'm not going to click on that because it doesn't go anywhere that I recognize and can verify. That "unsubscribe" link is worse than a real solution because it's only theatre.
You might want to start by addressing physical mail, or advertising billboards, if you want to radically overhaul some of the fundamentals of society.
It's on my todo list. The amount of incessant spam, that's legally protected by the USPS, is astonishing.
Can you walk me through the steps? Gmail doesn't let you create a filter which sends to the spam box. There used to be, but it was taken away. I know because I used it a lot.
Even if the feature was still there, it was still received instead of rejected, and it only moves the offending mail to the spam box instead of deleting it.
``` var threads = GmailApp.search("[your search criteria] -is:spam"); for (var iThread = 0; iThread < threads.length; iThread++) { GmailApp.moveThreadToSpam(threads[iThread]); } ```
Quickly going through their own documentation I found out that this is not true: Substack allows you to import CSV subscriber lists without the consent of each subscriber, ostensibly to allow painless migration of old mailing lists. That feature is of course abused, and they did nothing when I reported the abuse, presumably because spammers represent a large part of their business.
What a piece of shit company.
If someone, say, signs up for an account on your website and opts-in to marketing emails, then sure, you can send them marketing emails.
If you have no relationship with someone, or they haven't opted in, no, you should never send them even a single marketing email.
Now, actually important emails about my order or account, those I have no problem with.