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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

I personally like email because I don't usually have to deal with the worst of it, but the argument that it's useful because we all use it seems... incomplete. We all have addresses, should we be sending more mail? We all have pens, should we switch to longhand? Email is good for some stuff but not other stuff, no need to oversell it as a platform it was never meant to be and never will be.

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Good thoughts and I agree! The overloading of email is a huge problem, and no one wants more junk. So it comes down to receiving things that you really want.

With Bit of News, it's easy to unsubscribe with one click. If people didn't want it, they would have unsubscribed. At least that's what I would do.

I've found that people tend to like emails that they expect, and dislike the ones that are out of the blue. If you expect it everyday, it's a pleasure instead of an annoyance.

"it's easy to unsubscribe with one click. If people didn't want it, they would have unsubscribed"

Be careful with this assumption. It might surprise you how many people won't bother to click unsubscribe (no matter how obvious you make the option) b/c they just click "spam". I have friends who have been caught by this one in the past.

That's a good point but I think it's a weak assumption.

So far I haven't received any spam reports from Mailchimp - hopefully that's because I haven't received any instead of Mailchimp failing to catch any haha...

Which is why people need to put their Unscubscribe buttons in large at the top of their emails too, not just in tiny script at the bottom. :)

I don't know if that's quite true. I think in a script in the bottom is fine, as thats where people expect it to be. If its a simple, one-click thing, then its fine. I think adding big unsubscribe buttons at the top is just noise and obstructive to people that are actually reading your emails. Sure there are people that will just mark your email as spam or filter it to the trash, but I don't know how much of a difference the location of the unsubscribe button will make to them because I suspect they likely aren't even opening your emails to begin with.

i only click 'spam' or 'junk', and never,ever click any link in the mail itself.

I agree! There are also a lot of spam-mailers that use their unsubscribe link just to confirm that the email adress actually belongs to a human. Thats why I tend to ignore the unsubscribe button, when the mail looks fishy.

Wouldn't it be nice if mail programs followed any rel='unsubscribe' link found in a message, whenever the message was marked as spam?

No, because it would help spammers identify valid addresses.

This is the argument I see everyone using, but I don't understand it. Why does it matter if a spammer knows your address is valid, if they've already decided it's valid enough to spam it? Do you think spammers really bother to validate their address-lists before reselling them to other spammers? (Even if they do, though, I think it'd be irrelevant. If your spam filter is effective, it doesn't matter how much "true spam"--things you have absolutely no chance of finding interesting--you get. It all gets filtered away before you see it.)

Think about it this way: if there was an auto-unsubscribe mechanism, which ethical bulk email senders honored and spammers didn't, then it would become much easier to filter spam: any message that clusters into a message-cluster that the system has sent out an unsubscribe-request for already, is junk.

Maybe more importantly, they would know whether their message was classified as spam (or a pretty good heuristic thereof). A naive bayes classifier for spam relies on the spammer not knowing whether the message was marked as spam or not. Such a classifier isn't difficult to fool if you can test how a given message is classified. (Presumably gmail's spam filter is more advanced these days, but the idea that it is easier to fool if you can tell the result still seems reasonable.)

Here's an alternative idea: what if clients would only honor rel='unsubscribe' links with an HTTPS URL scheme, and only finish the TLS handshake for those requests if the host sends the client a valid Extended-Validation certificate?

Every spammer who wanted to "trick" the auto-unsub mechanism would basically have to first dox themselves for all the world to see. And any certificate that turned out to not be a valid means of contacting the spammer would be quickly revoked.

Well can't they do that anyways, by sending emails to an address they own and seeing what gets classified as spam?

>Why does it matter if a spammer knows your address is valid, if they've already decided it's valid enough to spam it?

Because then they can dictionary attack a large list of random emails, send out a trivial campaign, and collect a list of valid users then sell it to someone else.

As mentioned below, giving spamm'ers a way to test a block of (presumably random/dictionary-generated addresses) for valid subsets isn't a very good idea.

It would be nice if everyone that actually allows unsubscription would set the correct headers. In my experience, only traditional mailing-lists do, and all the stuff you really want to unsubscribe to reinvent a new interface over http(s). Which isn't great if you're in an email reader, not a web browser.

If people could get their act together and actually supply an accurate text/plain part to all the "fancy" html crap, that'd be great too.

It always makes me sad when companies realize that they've not got an interesting enough offer that stating it in a short concise text is going to get any conversions, an then assume that if they format it so it's unreadable on a small screen, add a lot of images that'll be blocked for privacy reasons, their offer will be more enticing.

Makes me even more sad that it (apparently) works.

That was my knee-jerk reaction too, until I actually clicked on the link to Bit of News page. It's very simple and straightforward. It says "Daily 60 sec news summary in your inbox" and asks you to enter your e-mail address to subscribe.

I've been in a lot of situations where I gave out my e-mail address to some site because I needed to have them let me know about something specific and then I started receiving unrelated stuff from them. That's what I would call a form of spam. But receiving periodic content you explicitly signed up for? I personally can't find a reason to call that spam.

If there's anyone who decides to subscribe to this and then later can't be bothered to unsubscribe, that's really their own problem.

Perhaps we need a ham filter instead of just one for spam.

Hey, if people want news in their email, your service seems great. I just think email is a weird platform for it, you know? Email is where I go to exchange electronic mail with other people - it's asynchronous electronic mail. For alerts, news, and time-sensitive stuff there are a lot more platforms or on-demand stuff (like going to a news website, or in my case just glancing at a news overlay i have on my desktop).

Don't get me wrong - people who want to use email this way deserve the most customizable and yet straightforward way of getting it and this looks useful for that. I just think email as a platform in this case is a one-forward-two-back thing.

I see what you mean. I made Bit of News based on my experience as a student. A lot of my friends read email in the morning on the go on iPhones - walking to class, riding the bus, etc. And I imagine it as a way to quickly read what's happening in the morning while you have nothing to do. That's also why every change I make, I always prioritize how it looks on the iPhone first lol

I'm not in the work environment so I can't personally imagine Bit of News to be read in Outlook / Apple Mail / Gmail on desktop while sitting in a chair. Like you said, in that environment email is probably best for time sensitive / work related things. YMMV!

News are usually not as time sensitive as you think, and if they really are then all your colleagues around you will already be talking about it.

I would find it comforting to be able to finish reading the news every day, just like a news paper. I also like the way you can refer to stories if everyone read the same news, "did you read the top news", as opposed to hacker news where items on the front page can go up and down by the minute. The constant refreshing of news is such a time sink. Picking the right stories for a fixed list of stories of course requires good editorizing

Email is great for read-mostly (or even read-only) things like email lists and various summaries and or editorialized contents -- if you have a good email reader that lets you clearly distinguish the two (eg: filter out mails with precedence: bulk/list-id set etc to folders that doesn't pop up alerts or get in the way of "actual people" trying to reach you).

I suppose part of the reason why I like email lists so much is the lack of redundant formatting. Just stick to the de-facto plain-text ways of formatting mail: star for bold, _underscore_ for underline (arguably redundant in itself), angle-brackets for quotation. Reply inline/below the person you're quoting. No graphical smilies. No suddenly changing text size. Just a strong focus on content and prose.

Granted, for actual news, I might want to see images -- and that's a bit of a challenge, sending out attachments to a large list doesn't sound all that appealing -- then again, we do have more bandwidth now than 20 years ago -- shouldn't actually be much of a problem.

> We all have pens, should we switch to longhand?

Yes and no.

It is a more intuitive interaction that keyboard for a lot of things, and has been used as such for a lot of things… Including by Steve Jobs who introduced the iPhone with one argument only, one that tops yours: better than pens (or rather, he said stylus) we have fingers and those are more convenient. The rest of ‘touch’ is history.

Penmanship is great but as an experienced calligrapher, trained fast hand-writer and reasonably fast typist: no one writes faster and legibly than they type, not after basic training.

Finally: Yes, you should consider switching to longhand when you do what that service does: think hard about the quality of the content. Hand writing goes a tremendous way in showing and triggering appreciation. I am actually devising a business plan with a friend around those lines.

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