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Comment by jsiegz | Hacker News Reader

Most major daily e-mail sites do this, they just don't always send an additional e-mail to let the customer know that they do it.

Basically, it's best practice to auto-unsubscribe users who never open their e-mails to reduce risk of being marked as spam after a while.

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Hey, on the marketing team at Fab. Honestly for us we never really considered the cost savings or have had to worry about being blacklisted. The decision wasn't almost entirely jump-started by anecdotal evidence from customer service that it would be a good idea. Obviously there are plenty of financial and operational reasons to do this, but ultimately if it's good for the customer then it's good for us and the brand.

Yeah I work for a daily email site and we do this too. We just don't send another email letting them know - that's more spam! I was surprised that this was considered newsworthy... Most people in the industry do this. It's definitely considered best-practice - it reduces costs, improves metrics, and probably doesn't subtract much value compared how much it costs to keep sending them emails.

You'd be surprised at how little most startup focused journalists know about the day to day of the industry. If it hasn't been touted in a press release or mentioned at an investors conference they probably don't know about it.

I think it's often not that cynical. I worked for a fairly large B2B email newsletter company and we would periodically clean the list mainly because we wanted an honest, accurate count of our list size.

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