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Comment by mustpax | Hacker News Reader

Think about it this way: when you attempt to unsubscribe, you are in effect telling the mass marketer that this is a live email address. As in, there's an actual human being reading these emails.

Such live email addresses are very valuable to spammers. So this feature is susceptible to abuse by spammers providing the unsubscribe functionality, but only prioritizing the attempted unsubscribers higher in their mailing lists.

So built into their unsubscribe attempt, there needs to be a way to very strictly penalize those who pretend to allow unsubscribes while ignoring them to harvest more email addresses. Hence, they call it "unsubscribe and mark as spam" because any other email messages you receive from that sender will be marked as spam with extreme prejudice.

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Google (or any other large e-mail provider, for that matter) could significantly decrease the value of an unsubscribe request to a spammer by automatically sending unsubscribe attempts every time an invalid e-mail address is hit with an e-mail with such a link. If spammers can't assume that an unsubscribe response means the e-mail address is live (and further, if the likelihood of a Gmail unsubscribe being a dead address is very high), then the scam no longer has any value to them, and they'll just stop doing it.

...in which case, it's still a useful thing to do, because it helps legitimate companies prune their e-mail databases of garbage addresses.

This just shifts the burden; GMail now becomes a spam reflector to an arbitrary target of your choosing.

I understand the goal but the implementation is a problem.

I personally think this could be worked out by comparing the sender of the email with the unsubscribe link with the recipient of the unsubscribe request and if they aren't related at a certain level, the unsubscribe request wouldn't go through.

Off course, there are probably problems with this, too.

This makes sense if all future emails from the sender are marked as spam, but the email I am using to unsubscribe should not be marked as spam.

The button should be "unsubscribe and mark all future emails as spam."

Yes, I agree it's worth clarifying the labels on the buttons. Detailed info what unsubscribe involves might be useful as well.

I'm just brainstorming about the implementation concerns behind this feature.

I usually use "mark as spam" as a "never show me anything like this again, please" button, so I do not really care if the message is really a spam.

What bugs me is that some legit mailing lists are prone to receiving spam once in a while.

I can't bring myself to do that. In my brain "mark as spam" is synonymous to "Mummy! Make the Bad Man go away!". I have trouble overloading this with "Gee I guess I'm just not that into you".

Well, I grew into "Mark as spam" before I got any spam,back when I my email was from a small local ISP and I didn't send many public emails. I taught mozilla's spam filter to recognize the forwarded emails my father sent me (and keep the emails he wrote himself), which were generally junk powerpoint presentations, so for me it's always been a way of saying "gee, I'm just not that into you" (which is also why I think I'd like a bayesian filter to learn my categorizations of messages into labels).

By doing that, you're teaching your mail client and, if your mail is hosted by Google, Gmail that that message was unsolicited and should not have been delivered to you or anyone else. That's bad! The solution is to set up filters to send messages you don't care about to non-inbox folders.

then add another button that just unsubscribes

Like I already explained: you have to treat all further email to the current address as spam after you unsubscribe.

You completely ignore what I wrote and repeat OP's point without making an argument.

why can't Google "unsubscribe" without labeling the thing as spam. Why can't it block the mail for that one specific user? Being labeled as spam is a BIG deal for companies.

You aren't just labeling it as spam for yourself, you are labeling it as spam for the world. When enough people complain the company will automatically get black listed from that email service Do you think a big company like Amazon shouldn't be able to deliver order confirmations, just because a bunch of people labeled it as spam when they tried to unsubscribe.

Granted that's probably not a big deal for Amazon, since they have connections, but what about all those small startups? Think of a disadvantage they'd get, compared to big boys with name recognition and connections.

It's like that certified email scam. Big companies jump on board, because they can pay the fee. If that ever catches on, you have an additional barrier to entry for the small fish.

Yes, I think a big company like amazon should be notified that its emails are being received as spam. I don't recall asking to hear about "new" books that do not interest me (for example), and rather like the fact that gmail's filter has learned that those messages are really spam, as far as I am concerned.

I really like pg's definition of spam.

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