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Comment by more_corn | Hacker News Reader

Email marketing is called spam.

There’s definitely a difference between spam and permission-based email marketing. Fertit is built specifically for legitimate newsletter subscriptions - subscribers opt-in through proper signup forms and can easily manage preferences or unsubscribe. It’s the same model used by every legitimate business newsletter, from GitHub updates to Substack publications. The focus is on providing value to people who actually want to receive the content.

Of course, you can just say this as an edgy blanket statement and prescribe personal preferences to everyone in the world.

A lot of people actually want to be sold to.

Only to tech nerds. When it's B2B, and targeted and positioned properly, it's business

When you’re on the receiving end of it… still spam.

If it doesn't offer anything of value, sure.

But the good ones do.

What a silly comment.

With a knife, you can stab a person to death or you can cut onions to dinner.

Huh? How is it spam when I receive newsletters I sign up for?

Are you confused between newsletters/marketing and actual spam maybe?

I would be willing to bet that vast majority of “subscribed” newsletters are spam.

I always receive a ton of newsletters. Never once have I signed up, I always uncheck all sign up prompts and always immediately unsubscribe if I receive one.

Even then, immediately after any sort of purchase I get resubscribed. I’m convinced that most shops completely ignore all user choices and resubscribe everyone to all mailing lists after purchase.

You’re absolutely right about this being a huge problem and it’s exactly why I built proper consent management into Fertit from the ground up. What you’re describing (auto-resubscribing after purchase, ignoring unsubscribe requests) is both illegal under CAN-SPAM/GDPR and terrible business practice. The legitimate use case is businesses that actually respect their subscribers. Think GitHub release notes, Substack authors, or local businesses sending monthly updates to customers who genuinely want them. But you’re spot on that too many companies abuse email marketing, which ruins it for everyone.

This is where I definitely appreciate sites/apps/newsletters that have at least a double confirmation (email validation) step before you start seeing garbage.

You'd be surprised how many people don't understand how, say gmail works and just start using an address they never signed up for and now I'm seeing mlb.com receipts for purchases, or someone's student loan paperwork.

In the end, every newsletter I ever signed up to ends up being spam. Acquisition of the company I signed up with or just change of plans: it always happen, usually within months, sometimes years, but I don't know of any cases it did not happen over the past 30 years of signing up to them.

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