Your Startup Is Spam | Hacker News Reader

Your Startup Is Spam

blog.metamorphium.com

193 pointsguptaneil64 comments

To implement this correctly, put your service's email address in the "Sender:" header (and also for the "mail from" when establishing the SMTP connection) to remain SPF compliant while still keeping the user's email address in the "From:" header:

http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Webgenerated

Note that this will show up as "(user's info) on behalf of (your app's info)" or "(user's info) via (your app's info)" depending on the recipient's mail client.

That page suggests adding a "Sender" header. Up to now I've always used the "Resent-from" header for the purpose of complying with the SPF requirements (pretending to be a forwarding service).

Do you now if there is an advantage of using one versus the other? Reading the RFC it looks like the "Sender" might be a bit more accurate in this context, but the Resent-From may look better in e-mail clients.

Unfortunately, in the most widely used Email client (Outlook), it will show up as

"(your app's info) on behalf of (user's info)"

So at a casual glance, the mail will still look as if it's coming from your app. Replies will go to your app's address too.

While a good idea in theory, this behavior of Outlook kind of renders the Sender header useless.

No it doesn't. The information on who this is supposedly from is useful, but hiding the actual sender is potentially harmful.

The thing is if you don't do that, you risk being marked as spam because you obviously don't control the gmail.com or hotmail.com domain.

We're still using an @tabuleapp.com email address for the From header, just setting the from name to be the user's name. This way we don't violate SPF constraints, and we can accept replies to the notification emails.

This is a good strategy. My only complaint with it (and I do it too for some things) is that it can mess up people's address books a little. For example, when I start typing someone's name in gmail, sometimes I get "Joe Smith <a3gfdf33sds32fs@someapp.com>" instead of "joesmith@hisdomain.com"

I love how Blackboard, despite years of legal intimidation and generally anti-competitive practices, is slowly being picked away at by the competition, not from some monolithic replacement but by smaller, targeted services that do one thing really well. Tabule looks very interesting. Two of my classes this semester are using Piazza for online discussions. What Piazza does to stop spammy emails is let you set a digest to aggregate all messages every n hours, which I really like.

Yeah, I've also been working on a startup in this space -Notable ( http://notable.ac ) - It allows students to take their notes collaboratively online, and everything is linked to the page in the course slides that it relates to. You can also ask questions on these documents and have them answered inline.

Would be interested in people's thoughts on it.

My school has recently switched from a branded variant of Blackboard, to Desire2Learn which bills itself as open, etc. From a student perspective, the usability is not much different.

One "feature" that drives me insane is it creates zips on the server side every time you download a file (e.g., lecture slides, PDFs) even if the download is only one file. Effectively blocks one from using it on an iPad.

There are apps (such as Filer) that make opening zip files relatively painless on the iPad.

That being said, using a site that zips everything sounds really annoying.

iPad can't open zip files?!

There's nothing to prevent it, but none of the built in apps handle such file types.

There is plenty of support via third party apps.

I cringed, thinking this was going to be a rant about startups, but it was actually a great piece of input on customer interaction. Tip of the hat to you.

I also felt that way. I think the title would be better rephrased (something along the lines of "people think your startup is spam") or put in quotation marks to indicate this aspect better.

Maybe my english isn't good enough for this article, but I don't have any clue what is meant with "RA" in this context. Neither the dictionary nor a quick google/wikipedia search gave any sensible explaination.

What is the "RA" of a student?

Is this story supposed to be fully understood by US citizens only?

Resident Assistant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_assistant

RA in the context of college is either "Resident Assistant" or "Research Assistant". Based on how it's used in the article, "Resident Assistant" sounds more likely as a Research Assistant is less likely to interact with students.

This hasn't solved the problem though, it's just passing the buck. If the app facilitates what people perceive as spamming, shouldn't that be something you want to look into? If you can improve the experience for the recipients of these e-mails, then you can be more honest about the app's association with them, and possibly draw more customers in from a "secondary" userbase.

Yeah, maybe this is hard to solve, but startups are always claiming that they're solving hard problems. So...solve!

I also enjoy enchiladas by the way.

That's absolutely a valid point. This solution is more like a band-aid than a cure. We are still actively trying to solve the root problem.

The issue for us is that it is difficult to accurately classify something as important or useful, and something as merely informational, since that classification can be different for each person. As we collect more data, this will become easier to do over time. In the meantime, we are looking at modifying our interface to encourage more targeted content.

This is a neat/good idea. I would love to hear if there is a counter argument why NOT to do this, though. However, your current logic makes a lot of sense to me. It's awesome that you (the OP of the article -- if it's not the HN op) could think outside of the box for this great solution.

The only argument I could potentially see is that by coming through the provider and not the "sendee" is the "real" mailbox spam filter. Maybe "joe@bob.com" gets marked as spam in the mail client but not if it's from "Google+", etc.

> Maybe "joe@bob.com" gets marked as spam in the mail client but not if it's from "Google+", etc.

I'm assuming they're just changing the display name on the email, rather than the 'From:' email address itself.

That is, instead of "Tabule <no-reply@tabuleapp.com>", it's now "John Smith <no-reply@tabuleapp.com>". The email doesn't get marked as spam because it's still claiming to be from the server that sent it, and it has the appropriate MX records and those sorts of things.

The thing that worries me with that approach is overzealous "add to address book" functionality. I don't want to be clicking "John Smith" in some dropdown and have it go to some noreply address at some third party.

I personally solve this by typing in full email addresses and memorizing my friends' email addresses, but I gather that's not how the world at large works.

You would not want to do this if for some reason you wanted to anonymize the sender or at least act as a proxy to protect the sender's information (as you noted). But another reason is publicity/visibility - startups need plenty of name recognition, and having your name be associated with a useful service is certainly one way of doing it (as long as your customers don't end up classifying as "spam" like the OP's customers).

GitHub, Basecamp and Facebook have all been doing the same (eg. "Joe Bob" <blah-2131214241421@github.com>), using the unique identifier in the email address name to figure out what message a user is replying to.

Kudos to the OP for the write-up; there are still too many companies taking the Company Name approach.

Hey I was wondering how you do this technically? Do you for example give Joe Smith a new email address (i.e. joe.smith@service.com)? Or do you change the name-addr for a no-reply@service.com?

What about triggering scam warning?

Basecamp and GitHub set From: to something that looks like "Joe Smith" <foo-bar-123124312313@github.com>, which is enough to have GMail display the email as from a "Joe Smith" in the inbox.

We're just changing the from name for the email, and each notification has a unique email address associated with it, so it shouldn't trigger any scam warning.

Cool thanks.

Facebook sends email notifications about new messages with the sender's name in the From field, but uses an address like "notification+[randomid]@facebookmail.com". In Gmail, at least, the sender name is prominently placed, while the actual address is rather hidden.

Edit: This seems to only apply to posts made in groups.

This is what we're doing too. I was not aware that Facebook does the same.

I just noticed that this only applies to posts made to groups. My bad!

Your mascot is a Koala, but you don't allow students from UNSW (an Australian university) to use your service?

> @student.unsw.edu.au not accepted

I think the product looks awesome, but I would never use it. (I am a student.)

Here's why: For me, it appears to attempt to solve the problems of: a calendar, reminders, and school-related task management.

During the first week of each class, I "process" the syllabus by adding the major assignment due dates (usually 3-5 over the course of a quarter), and exam dates to my Google Calendar. This is a pretty quick process. It's so little overhead that I think setting up a sharing system with others to try to share the data is actually more overhead. (I have used a setup like this for 10 years myself, and I expect most students have something similar.)

I get text-message based reminders a week in advance for these special events (a separate calendar from my usual one for easy color differentiation). The professors always list and review contents of major exams and details of upcoming projects already anyway.

And finally, my student / project tasks are managed separately in another system alongside all my other projects and areas. It never made sense to me to separate the student side when really my entire life is project-based. For this type of system, I've used text-based GTD, Wunderlist, Taskpaper, etc.

That said... If I could sign into your app the first week of my class and have all this done automatically for me, I would be very happy.

Thanks for the feedback! Those are some great points, and something that we've been discussing for some time.

We're experimenting with a couple marketing strategies. Our primary strategy has been to focus on students for a grassroots adoption, hence the silly marketing copy and the koala logo. We've been handing out t-shirts and posting funny flyers on various college campuses.

In addition, we are talking to professors to encourage them to officially adopt Tabule in their classrooms. The teachers that are currently using Tabule are seeing a large increase in student participation, since they feel more comfortable asking questions. It also provides the students with an official source for due dates that's collaboratively maintained, so it should always be correct.

The biggest problem is, like you mentioned, the students that are most likely to be organized and post content to Tabule are also the ones that have less of a need for a system like ours. That's why we are starting to lean towards focusing more on marketing directly to instructors, although that is a much harder market to reach and to convince to try new technology.

Having said that, I think you would still find Tabule useful over organizing assignments yourself in Google Calendar because if an assignment is announced later in the semester and isn't on the initial syllabus or if a due date changes, you're more likely to have the correct information if you and your classmates are using Tabule.

Hi, I'm a (fellow) cofounder at Tabule.

You make a lot of valid points. As guptaneil alluded to, the ideal case would be if we could get teachers to post their assignments on Tabule. Teachers for the most part already post assignments online, but the education market lacks a good central homework management system that aggregates assignments between classes.

What we're trying to achieve is to bridge to that ideal case with student-submitted assignments. There's an interesting dynamic at play here, because inputting all of one's assignments is trivially better (perhaps even worse if we consider switching cost) than using Google Calendar. For the second person to join the course though, the experience is already better, because all of their assignments are already available to them. It's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. If my assignments aren't already in the system, then there's no immediate value for me, but there will be for everyone that comes after me.

No idea how your actual finance side works, but the obvious way to solve this seems to be to offer a reward to the first student to enter assignment data for each class. A couple of checks would be necessary, i.e, reward is only valid after two other students confirm the data, to prevent students just adding junk. Have you considered something like this? Market it like 'all your assignment dates ready for you, or get a red bull on us!'

Guptaneil and etrinh, I appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

Regarding a reward-based or gamification system, this is an excellent idea. Of course, it would not necessarily be monetary. To give a specific example, Dropbox has become very good at gamifying their recruitment by posing their challenges for expanding storage space. A similar adoption here could be interesting. I plan to follow Tabule's development and adoption curiously.

Is it possible to do this if you use Amazon SES? IIRC you have to validate every address you use to send outbound mail.

You can now validate an entire domain.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/05/15/amazon-...

SendGrid doesn't care what you put in for your from: address.

When facebook started doing this for groups it took me a while to work out how to filter the emails (I don't read email unless it comes from a real person - facebook group interactions, since they are scattergun announcements, don't count as real people..)

The answer ended up being to configure facebook's byzantine settings on a per-group basis, which still means I get hit for 5 or 10 messages when someone adds me to a group, and before I can get to the web interface to 'unsubscribe'.

This spammy RA would be less of a problem, as it would be easy to filter one Tabule user - but it does make it a pain to have a "MailingLists/Tabule" gmail label containing all the Facebook/Tabule/whatever messages!

One option is to catch any email that ends with @tabuleapp.com or @facebook.com to label notification emails from those services.

this only works if the email comes from that domain. Facebook, I think, switched to setting the 'from' email using the users' registered emails (i.e. the user who posted on the group wall seems to have sent you an email by doing so...)

I have the same sort of reaction to Piazz(z)a, and I think they try the solution you propose. I think it's because I perceive Piazza as encouraging the course staff to send more emails than they otherwise would. This may or may not be true, but I subconsciously think it is.

It _is_ true that I get more random invitations to things I only slightly care about via social media, and those rare invitations I get by actual personal email tend to be things I strongly care about. So the argument can be made that Facebook and G+ _are_ spamming me, by encouraging my acquaintances to spam me.

The content matters too. They are certainly spamming you if the email they send just says "<Person You Know> just sent you a message on <Service>!" and force you to log in to read the actual message. Just put it in the email, willya?

Don't worry, we put the actual message in the email. We hate those types of notifications too :)

I loved the "Don't click this" on the main homepage https://tabuleapp.com/

I didn't. Whenever I see someone who thinks they're clever saying something like "don't click this" or "I know I'm going to be downvoted but..." I immediately take the action they don't want. It's not clever. It has been done / said 1000 times before.

Tabule's website is terrible. It says absolutely nothing about what it is. I bounced after 5 seconds and will promptly forget about them.

Actually, I would normally agree with you if this were a service targeted to the HN crowd, who has probably seen this or other clever marketing techniques too many times to be amused. But keep in mind that our target market is college students, who spend less time looking at startup launch pages and are far less likely to have seen that. For that audience, our "don't click this" button has been very positively received, as it always seems to get a giggle from what we've seen so far.

As for saying exactly what it is, that can and will be improved :) thanks for the feedback!

I tried to sign up for Tabule and the activation email was filtered as spam. I laughed a good bit.

That's actually something we haven't managed to figure out why that happens. I'm no expert in email optimization, but I can't figure out why Google insists on marking our welcome email as spam. Is it something in the wording? If anybody here knows more about getting email past spam filters, I'd love some advice!

The html to text ratio is a bit high. I would suggest sticking with a plaintext email for now.

If you stick with html, make sure it validates. The font tag's 'face' attribute doesn't look legal as it is.

Hmm thanks for the tip, I'll try switching to plaintext. I wish we hadn't wasted so much time building an HTML template now.

I n addition to "changing all notification emails for Tabule to be from the person who triggered the notification" you could also give the user control of how many emails they receive. i.e. address the actual email volume problem, not just the perception of it.

The user already has control of which emails they get. The problem is that these notifications actually are important to receive, since it would be bad for him if he never got an important announcement from his RA. If Tabule did not adequately notify him, his RA would have to just directly email him instead, which would result in the same number of emails in his inbox.

To avoid being spam filtered you should set the from name to the person sending it, use you system address as the from email and use the sender's personal email as a reply to.

Do you know how precise the reply-to has to be? Example, a user in our system is known to us as James Hendrix, but he commonly goes by Jimi Hendrix or Hendrix, Jimi. Thanks...

Doesn't matter. Only the From: and Sender: matter.

thanks, this helped me: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2231897/potential-issues-...

Hi Neil! Nice to see you on here. Good to hear your product is gaining traction

-Benglert

Good story.

Sooooo... Can you not do this, so I can haz more cloak spamz?

I would have just said "haters be hating" and spammed some more.

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