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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

It's not just them. Yeah, this is bad, but I get tons of unsolicited messages from any company I establish a basic relationship with. Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to. Then 6 months later I receive some stupid new thing as they try to drum up engagement.

One that particularly bugs me is Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff with a note at the end saying "You're receiving this servicing email as part of your existing relationship with us." Can't block it without blocking actual important banking emails. Experian was doing the same - promoting services under the guise of offering account updates. It does feel desperate, but one has to imagine that this firehose technique works.

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It's nuts and I can't believe it works. It's interesting that you're getting bank P.R. fluff with that 'should be illegal' workaround - I've been getting them from my bank in Australia and wondered if we had really slack laws. A mass mail-out solution like - say - Mail Chimp would not let users do this. There has to be an unsubscribe link on mass-mail blasts and you should not be able to pretend P.R. fluff is suddenly "transactional." I also don't want to be lectured about mindfulness by a bank!

>"It's nuts and I can't believe it works."

The success rate is low, but the problem is that it's an arms race, where every competitor is spamming, so each new entrant (or non-spammer) must try to spam even harder to compete. If one elects not to spam, they are at a competitive disadvantage. If there is an anti-spam law or regulation, this just benefits competitors from other jurisdictions, where it is difficult to enforce the rule.

So then enforce the rule on the receiver side: people in your jurisdiction should have the right to be free from spam, and if you want to serve customers there, you need to comply. I'm pretty sure companies aren't going to opt out of the US market because if they're not allowed to send stupid marketing emails anymore.

>"So then enforce the rule on the receiver side: people in your jurisdiction should have the right to be free from spam, and if you want to serve customers there, you need to comply."

Every anti-spam regulation or law has this provision. The problem is that laws and regulations are rarely enforced, especially against people outside the jurisdiction which created the rule. Look at how infrequently GDPR is enforced outside the EU; it isn't even enforced rigorously against entities clearly violating it inside the EU!

An appliance repair company I used exactly once maybe 5 or 6 years ago recently started spamming me with texts and emails trying to get me to refer friends to use them or use them again. Never hit the "report spam" button faster.

I'd kinda understand it if they had sent me a polite text or email shortly after our initial engagement saying "hey, if you had a good experience please review us/recommend us" but coming in literal years late with a blast of multiple messages screams "we hired some sort of marketing firm and fed them our customer database".

Having worked in donor dependent nonprofit, this kind of stuff just unfortunately works way too well. You'd be surprised what generates the most revenue. Despite having a large digital audience, we had the highest conversion rate on paper mailers. All the popups and email begs just worked way more often than they pissed anybody off. The economics demand it.

And it stands to reason NYT do this so aggressively since they also have by far the most successful subscription business in the entire world of journalism.

> Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to.

Luckily this kind of thing is very much illegal here in the EU. If they send me marketing shit without my explicit active consent, they are in violation of the law, and I can at least report them. As I do. It is still not perfect, but the amount of spam I get from previous business relations has declined a lot in the past years. Other spam is still rampant, and I can only block any such sender until they find a new way to push their shit.

That is correct, and it his also correct that most of the spam we receive comes from outside the EU.

> I get tons of unsolicited messages from any company I establish a basic relationship with

Give them a masked email (if you get a custom domain, you can make it so any random string of characters is a new masked email). Block all calls and texts except from contacts

> Bank of America, which sends all kinds of promotional stuff

Use a different bank (for more reasons than avoiding spam)

The Mitch Hedberg joke about getting a receipt for a donut is now an email newsletter.

There needs to be a small claims private right of action for this.

Just don't check the box with "I do want promotions". It sometimes is a little hard to find but I don't think I have encountered a service where this does not exist.

I never check it, and still get these.

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