Hacker News Reader

Comment by dendory | Hacker News Reader

Every web site I sign up to these days, I'm 100% certain that from that point forward I will now be spammed by them on a regular basis. It's a simple fact of the modern web now and I despise it. But when those emails look like this one, I hate them even more. Why? Because a normal form spam mail is easy to recognize. I can hit the spam button in under a second. But when they use my first name, sound all happy and cheery, and talk like they're my best friend, I have to actually read the first sentence to see that it's spam. It not only takes me longer, but it makes them seem even worse. To me an email like that doesn't tell me they are more interested to 'engage', but instead that they want to trick people to read them. You know what I want? For them to never send me any email unless I specifically request it.

View on HN

Every web site I sign up to these days, I'm 100% certain that from that point forward I will now be spammed by them on a regular basis.

That's mighty bad luck. I signed up for a site called Hacker News, and I don't get any spam from them at all.

You know what I want? For them to never send me any email unless I specifically request it.

Does that include not sending you a written copy of, say, an order you've placed on Amazon?

Another example: We're going to be sending a minimum of one e-mail to all new customers for my company, because we're required by law to provide certain details under European e-commerce rules and e-mail is the most practical and non-intrusive way to do that.

Basically, I take your point that people being all chummy and sending you loads of junk mail because you once visited their site is out of line, but I think your position as stated is based on hyperbole and unrealistic.

> That's mighty bad luck. I signed up for a site called Hacker News, and I don't get any spam from them at all.

That's disingenuous. He signed up for HN 2 years ago. That's not "these days".

Does HN spam people who sign up today? If not, my point is just as valid.

Your point is that one site out of millions doesn't spam people. That's not a particularly valid point.

You don't have to provide an email when you sign up for HN though...

"Every web site I sign up to these days, I'm 100% certain that from that point forward I will now be spammed by them on a regular basis. It's a simple fact of the modern web now and I despise it. But when those emails look like this one, I hate them even more. Why? Because a normal form spam mail is easy to recognize. I can hit the spam button in under a second. "

It's not spam. Don't sign up for the site if you don't want to get emails from them. Or, be courteous and use their unsubscribe link.

You signed up for their site to get their service/product/whatever, and their terms state someplace that you'll get emails from them. That's part of doing business with them.

Let me repeat, just to be clear.

"IT'S NOT SPAM".

Unless, of course, you're one of those whose definition of spam is "any email I don't want".

If they don't confirm the email address then it's spam.

If they default to opt-in, instead of default to opt-out, then it's spam.

Creating the account and confirming your email address is the opt-in, for certain things.

For example, it's reasonable for an account manager to email you as a customer and see how the product demo is going and ask if you need any help with something. If you don't care to hear from them, then let them know but that is not spam.

Spam is sending someone email when they've never contacted you before or still sending someone messages when they've asked you to stop.

Spam is unsolicited bulk email. Since too many services ask for an email address, and do not ask permission to email you anywhere in the sign up, many services are on the spammy end of just about acceptable. Really, it's a misuse of the "Emailing someone who has a business relationship to you is fine" clause. People creating an account out of curiosity do not have a business relationship and are not really giving you permission to email them.

People need to understand this because receivers will happily misuse spam reporting tools. Even when following best current practice some email will end up flagged as spam, but this can be improved by following bcp.

Just for extra clarity because I mangle this stuff sometimes.

> Spam is sending someone email when they've never contacted you before

That's why the email address needs to be confirmed; to prevent someone using another person's email address. That doesn't need to be malicious. There are examples of people mistyping domain names and having all their email sent somewhere else.

> or still sending someone messages when they've asked you to stop.

Really people need to include a checkbox, that defaults to [NO], asking for permission to send email when the account is created. Just being given an email address isn't enough, especially if one is needed to see anything about the product.

Spam is more than bulk email. Spam is being followed/unfollowed on twitter to get your attention. Spam is a linked in invite from someone you've never heard of. Spam is a flyer on your car window. Spam is the door menu for the local pizza store.

Spam is someone contacting you to market a product when they have never had contact with you otherwise.

> For example, it's reasonable for an account manager to email you as a customer and see how the product demo is going and ask if you need any help with something. If you don't care to hear from them, then let them know but that is not spam.

Remember that "Do Not Track" header? I kind of wish that had gone forward, but slightly differently--with something more like a "Don't Try To Interact With Me; Pretend I'm Not Here" header.

You know how, in most brick-and-mortar shops, it's a sales rep's obligation to make sure that every customer in the store has been asked "if they need anything" at least once? And how for a certain subset of the population, you often wish you could come into the store with a big flashing neon banner above your head saying "I'M JUST BROWSING THANKS" so they'd know in advance not to do it? ...except that, obviously, that would be horrible?

On the internet, it wouldn't have to be horrible at all.

It is beyond easy to do that online. Get a throwaway email address that's only used when you don't want to be contacted. If you end up liking the product and want to interact with the company, fill out their change of email form.

ABC simple.

Eh, if they'd said they'd get a bunch of crap they don't want, the underlying tone of the message would have remained unchanged. Whether it's spam or not, it's still potentially pretty darned annoying.

Annoying, perhaps. But reporting it as 'spam' to your mail provider is treating it the same as the bulk nigerian prince scams and v14gr4 p1ll5 junk. It's not.

Sure it is. Just being in possession of someone's email address is not the same as having permission to send to that address.

Confirm the address, and make sure you have permission[1] to send to that address, before sending to an address otherwise your email is exactly the same as 419 scam and goji berry email.

[1] Either from a checkbox where the user has opted in or a pre-existing business relationship. And that's not "I gave you my email address to download your app".

How would you fix this for OP? If you ran a web business, what would you do to replace email as a channel for onboarding new customers, telling current customers about a new feature, or reactivating lapsed ones?

When their account is activated, have a landing page that provides the onboarding links, and offers them the opportunity to opt in to onboarding and new feature emails as part of their profile or registration.

For lapsed accounts, it should be a user-initiated process. If you're genuinely bothered about lapsed accounts, a "We're going to deactivate your account as you're not using it" email is probably fine.

Still spam by the definition of the top comment.

> Still spam by the definition of the top comment.

I see where you're coming from, but if it's made clear at registration that say, after 6 months of inactivity they'll notify you to say they're deactivating the account in a month, then it's not unreasonable. Perhaps better than just deactivating it without telling you.

With a lot of startups offering freemium services, there needs to be a way to either increase retention or reduce overheads with inactive accounts. You still have to pay for storage on your cloud provider, so closing inactive accounts while not great are certainly within the realms of possibility compared to trying to spam people into upgrading.

Here's the problem: it works.

Email is still the most effective way of reaching people on the Internet.

Truth is a certain amount of spam is like a vital sign. If you log in and you have no spam you have to wonder if there is a problem with your email server (if you run one) or your email provider.

"I will now be spammed by them on a regular basis"

Can't you just unsubscribe from their mailing list? Almost all give you the possibility to unsubscribe.

Not from the get-go. You usually have to click on the unsubscribe link in the first piece of spam they send you.

That's what I meant actually :)

To me an email like that doesn't tell me they are more interested to 'engage'

When it's an email like the one from this blog I actually do feel that they are looking to engage — even though I know the email itself wasn't sent personally.

I like the invitation to reply — I've done that several times with a random question or thought about the product / service. Knowing that the person on the other end expects and welcomes those kinds of random emails is helpful. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't send it — and I expect many others feel the same way, which is why these types of emails are seeing a lot of success.

I agree that the over-friendly "hey, let's engage!" style is annoying. It feels like a sales tactic hidden under a patronising wrapper. But I do like that the emails provide a human touch. Someone has put a bit of thought into them and there seems to be a real person at the other end. In that respect, I think a middle ground is probably best - a short, friendly welcome with maybe a confirmation that we won't email you again unless you ask.

Incidentally I also like adding [Non-urgent] in subject lines for mails that can safely be ignored, but that's just my personal preference.

You might want to try setting up a second email address to sign up for services. That's what I do, never checked unless I've just signed up for something. :)

Barring that, you might want to use a different form of your name. Like all my friends call me the short form of my name - so whenever I get the long form I know right away that it's a company.

+1 for smart advice - use a separate email account for logins and never worry about unsolicited email to your primary email account :)

I feel this way with respect to sites that I am forced to sign up for just to view the demo. Sites that I will never use again ... I don't want them being my best friend yet.

If I've tried the demo and I am actually signing up to use your site, this type of email would be tolerable, but again, I generally don't want to engage with the company unless I have an issue.

The only time I can see this being welcome to me is in a B2B context where I have signed a longer-term contract for a solution that my business will need support for.

If you're using gmail or google apps just add a +words to your email and then you can set up easy filters and figure out if anyone is selling or renting your information.

e.g. sergey@gmail.com --> sergey+zappos@gmail.com

Here is the method that I use, which has been extremely effective for me.

This is a Gmail filter that will leave in your inbox ONLY emails that are from people you specify, AND emails that haven't already been labeled from some other filter rule:

  Matches: (label:inbox has:nouserlabels -from:(importantPerson1@gmail.com OR importantPerson2@gmail.com OR ... ))

  Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label "_Non-VIP", Never mark it as important

Boom!

Now I never get emails to my inbox unless they are from my girlfriend, family members, friends, and other important people. This has the added benefit of also meaning that I never get email notifications on my phone unless they are from the important (and REAL) people I specified above. (And obviously I can add easily emails to the whitelist if necessary.)

The other benefit is that this WILL take into account any other filter rules you have in place. And also no need to worry about signing up for services with +emails.

Before you post that zomg this would never work for me, please don't. This works extremely well for me and it might work well for someone else so I wanted to share. If you have a way to make it even better, I would love to hear it!

Out of curiosity, how do you handle whitelisted people changing their email address? My dad recently switched from Y!Mail to Gmail, for instance.

I simply change the filter.

The first time I see an email that gets filtered that I don't want filtered in the future, I simply add that email to the whitelist. It takes me 15 to 30 seconds, and now it is set forever.

A) Gmail filters aren't etched in stone. They are easy to edit. Much more so than Outlook anyway.

B) The impact of not seeing an email on my phone for an hour or two because I didn't get an Android email notification is near zero. The important people are already whitelisted, and for those emails that aren't, they're never 100% urgent and can wait an hour or two until I check my labels in one batch session.

This works extremely well for me but YMMV.

Does that answer your question?

I'll give you a +1 Upvote for apparently the only person who read my post haha, and that bit of insight into what might not be clear.

The problem is that the new email address would get filtered out of the inbox and I wouldn't see it, if I understood the filter correctly. My dad would have had to let me know through some means other than email.

Ah, I think there may be some confusion as to how Gmail works. The purpose of labels in Gmail is that you can click them and see all the emails with that particular label. This is analogous to a folder in Windows XP or Windows 7 with files in it.

You may be confusing "filtering" with "deleting", where this is definitely NOT the case. The point of my above post is that inessential emails skip my inbox until I CHOOSE to click the label (when I have time), and then I see the inessential emails all at once.

I do this several times per day, so there is no risk of "missing" an email. In the case of getting an email from your dad at a new address, I would click the label at lunch or whenever convenient, and boom, there it is.

Just because an email is not in your "Inbox" doesn't mean it is gone forever.

Does that make sense?

-----

I did a bit of research and below I inserted some snippets from the official Gmail Help pages that would be good to read over to understand more about what I am getting at:

-----

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/32608

  Deleting unimportant mail is a great way to free up some of your storage, 
  but with Gmail's free storage, you can probably keep those messages, 
  too! If it's possible that you'll need a message or conversation in the 
  future, we recommend archiving.

  Archiving mail moves messages out of your inbox and into your "All Mail" 
  label for safekeeping-- you won't be bothered with extra messages 
  cluttering your inbox, but you'll still be able to find a message if you need 
  it six years from now!

-----

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6576

  Archiving lets you tidy up your inbox by moving messages from your inbox 
  into your All Mail label, so you don't have to delete anything. It's like 
  moving something into a filing cabinet for safekeeping, rather than 
  putting it in the trash can.

  Any message you've archived can be found by clicking the "All Mail" label 
  on the left side of your Gmail page. You can also find a message you've 
  archived by clicking on any other labels you've applied to it, or by 
  searching for it.

  When someone responds to a message you've archived, the conversation 
  containing that message will reappear in your inbox.

----

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708

  Labels help you organize your messages into categories -- work, family, 
  to do, read later, jokes, recipes, any category you want. Labels do all 
  the work that folders do, but with an added bonus: you can add more 
  than one to a message.

  Only you can see your labels, so whether you mark a message with "Best 
  friend" or "Read later," the sender will never know.

Except that a trivial s/\+.+@gmail\.com// processing rule will defeat that elaborate security scheme. You really need revokable addresses that don't reveal the unrevokable address.

Many (most?) of them strip of bits with + in them so you never find out.

I have never seen this happen.

It may not be widespread yet and I just got unlucky a few times, but it's a purely mechanical transformation that's easy to do, they'll do it eventually.

> I have to actually read the first sentence to see that it's spam.

I second that. In fact I lost my primary Gmail account recently to unsolicited mail, by signing up with just one wrong guy. Started receiving roughly 600 junk daily in my inbox starting from (1) insurance schemes from big banks to (2) UK LOTTERY from our Nigerian brothers.

Betweeen (1) and (2) above, I must say, I did have to actually read first few sentences of (2) to decide that it was spam. That's so true, and scary at that.

I guess, this problem actually stems from the fact that by design email is vulnerable. And that we're forced to keep our email address a secret and share it very carefully - like using simple obscurity [username at servicename dot com] type of stuff... but this is not enough.

This model also makes spam filtering a costly affair for the service provider. I wonder how much additional cost Google has to bear to filter spam and malicious? Have seen it often that flooding continues and continues until the user is forced to change his/her email address and start all over again.

It's no wonder that over 97% of global email is unwanted [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam

I am surprised all the types of email you mentioned make it to your Gmail inbox. Gmail has a good spam prevention mechanism (maybe the best out there). Unless these emails are drafted specifically for you, in which case I think you should be flattered! :)

I think it's a matter of training the gmail filter. If you don't properly mark spam and unmark false positives, it doesn't have any feedback from you.

I noticed that if I accidentally mark certain emails as spam, then such emails end up straight to spam in the future.

Maybe, but email about UK Lottery won't make it to your inbox at all, or so was my experience anyway. Gmail team probably had to train the model during that long period of beta (three years if I remember correctly) so it makes sense to account for user feedback. I would be surprised if they still do it now.

I thought all of the junk goes into gmail's spam folder by default.

No it does not. A lot of it lands in the inbox, though majority does goes to the spam folder.

Here I got this one, for example:

"Barr. D Salim <atmcad21@embarqmail.com>

May 3 (5 days ago)

to undisclosed recipients you are been compensate"

============================================

Another:

Dianne Yak <yak.dianne@yahoo.com> May 5 (3 days ago)

to undisclosed recipients Hello dear

I am Dianne, I am a young girl, i was wondering if we can be friends, who knows may be it might grow in to some thing deep, i want a friend i can share something with. seeing your email, I have the confidence in contacting you. I know this mail will come to you as a surprise but treat it with care, we can share photos, to know each other more. I hope to hear from your respond soon.

Yours faithfully

===========================================

There you go! High quality spam that beats Google hand down. :)

You have interesting friends. Any email that puts my name in the subject line is spam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com