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Comment by Ensorceled | Hacker News Reader

My clients have been experiencing this forever; the logs SAY "temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation." but really the emails are never going to get delivered. I have to get MailChimp or Mailgun to rotate the IPs.

It looks like all it takes is one person to mark your email as spam, even by accident. Note that these are mailing lists which they signed up for in MailChimp case OR transactional emails in the Mailgun case.

It's only hotmail/outlook that we constantly have this issue with, Google etc. are all fine.

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Often these "spam" reports by end users are just accidental clicks as well. Many of the abuse reports we get are like an email from someone's Mum and visibly legitimate. At other times there are users who use the Report Spam function as a kind of inbox management tool - a way of moving mail away so they don't have to see it because Trash or Delete or whatever is just further away from their pointer.

I tell my friends and family to never click unsubscribe links, unless they had proactively subscribed. Buying something from a company that requires an email does not count. unsolicited marketing emails are spam and should be treated as such. Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com.

> Double so if that company sends marketing emails disguised behind support@company.com

That’s typically not a disguise but a clear means of indicating that you can reply to the email

No, sending marketing from support emails is almost certainly trying to game spam filters. Marketing@company.com would work for the allow replies purpose.

> sending marketing from support emails is almost certainly trying to game spam filters

That is not how spam filters work.

If I've interacted with a specific email address, like support@company.com, my email provider will put them in my inbox.

How is it not a disguise? It means you can't block marketing emails without also blocking the legitimate support emails.

"Report spam" is quicker and easier than "unsubscribe".

Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers, so it must be common enough to warrant Gmail developer attention.

> Gmail added a popup asking the user if they want to unsubscribe when flagging a newsletter with the appropriate unsubscribe headers

Unfortunately close to 100% of the spam I'm flagging causes this popup now :-/

I'm getting a dozen spam a day now on my Gmail account ... I think they're losing the battle.

Does gmail still insert ads in the free tier? That would be a reason to keep people reading as many emails as possible.

Pretty sure hotmail/outlook also has the same sort of popup for spam reports. I think accidental would be kind of hard with that popup.

Thing is, unsubscribe links are often an "inform spammers that this mail address is in use" link. Even the ones Gmail offers up.

If I didn't click their button to subscribe, I'm not clicking their button to unsubscribe. Who's to say they won't just "sign me up" again after a while? In fact I know several large US corporations which routinely sign you up for notifications again after a few months.

If you didn't click the button, then of course, you don't send the unsubscribe message.

If you did subscribe to a newsletter and no longer want to receive it (which is the majority of these cases), then the unsubscribe action is the logical thing to do.

> If you did subscribe to a newsletter and no longer want to receive it (which is the majority of these cases), then the unsubscribe action is the logical thing to do.

Not the second time :-)

Agreed. I was an early outlook.com user (was working at MS when it launched, I think internal users got slightly early access allowing me to claim a nicer name than my Gmail) but despite having well over a decade of accounts tied to it got so angry at certain messages never appearing that a couple of years ago I reversed the flow of forwarding and swapped to another account as my primary.

Sounds like it's gotten even worse.

I always thought of outlook.com as a rebranding of Hotmail (which itself had been continually evolving, was probably actually “Live” at that point), I would expect it is the same (ever evolving) infrastructure.

In which case, people like me with an @hotmail.com address from the 90’s were much earlier users of the outlook.com email boxes than when the domain was “launched” by Microsoft.

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