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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

As I have said in past threads about marketers who assume their promotional messages are anywhere near as important to me as personal email from friends... "fuck you" (the marketers, not jstalin)

To me that should include the unsolicited bulk messages from recruiters, all the stupid social emails from twitter, facebook, linked-in etc too... It's overload.. there's too damned much of it.

IMHO if you are a business and are sending more than one email a month that isn't regarding a direct transaction (your receipt, your order has shipped, etc)... you're sending out too much crap.

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social emails:

Filter them. I have email records of all FB messages, friend confirmations, etc. but they never hit my inbox

promotional email:

You're lumping everything together. Patio11's emails, which I signed up for and love reading, end up in the promotions tab.

Have you heard of 'permission marketing'? Every email I get from a business, I asked for. I WANT to see them.

If a business sends me too much, or stuff I don't want to see, I unsubscribe.

It sounds like you've signed up for a bunch of things you don't want, and haven't unsubscribed.

I think you are reducing this too much. It is not just a matter of whether I want email from a company or not. Just because I want email from them doesn't necessarily mean I _always_ want to read _everything_ they send me. Neither does it mean that I want to unsubscribe if they send me "too much," because "too much" is a function of how busy I am on a particular day, as well as how many unread emails I have that day. Having Gmail put these emails in their own tab means I don't have to explicitly add them all to a specific filter.

> Patio11's emails, which I signed up for and love reading, end up in the promotions tab.

So drag them back into the main folder. I did. Works great.

I have had a problem where people sign up for stuff using my email address. Yes I can (and do) unsubscribe, but it is really nice that these are now pretty much all filtered out of my inbox automatically.

I've never seen a marketer verify email to make sure it was actually the requester who owns the email like other web services do.

Almost all the big email marketing software sends you an email after sign up to verify you want to receive emails from them. It's called "double opt-in".

Key word: "almost".

I've got a large and growing procmail list of complete idiots (yep, shell mail on a private box).

In a previous world you could use 1 email for personal and 1 email for everything else. Unfortunately websites & apps harvesting users address books has ruined that.

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