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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

It is users such as yourself that make spam filters have the kinds of silly false positives being discussed in this thread: as a user (not as a product owner; I am a product owner, but I don't send e-mail, so I have no "skin in the game": so, you can claim all you want that the people downvoting you are all product owners, but some of us really do just feel you are abusing a shared system to carry on some kind of personal vendetta) it really sucks that I can't trust spam filters to not filter valid e-mail out of my inbox because people like you are so trigger-happy (and in some cases, simply vindictive) with the spam button... it is my sincere hope that services like Gmail are at least sometimes smart enough to realize "this person is just being annoying" and makes your spam votes meaningless :/.

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"Personal vendetta"

Hahaha! YES! I have a personal vendetta against unsolicited email.

If you send me an email that I am not expecting, then I will flag it as "unsolicited".

I do not care if you provide other mechanisms for handling unsolicited email. I do not care if you used a dark pattern to technically ask me to solicit the email without my conscious knowledge.

The way you call it vindictive is empowering and enlightening.

It's your way of calling it unfair, of attacking the person as immoral and undermining the point of their behavior. You're trivializing them as petty. Instead of saying "I understand why someone might be unhappy at me sending them email they do not want" you say "it is vindictive and petty for someone to treat unwanted advertising from for-profit businesses this way". What a sick joke.

So you know what? GOOD! If "vindictive" means "control over your inbox" then I AM VINDICTIVE. I will PUNISH anyone who gets into my inbox without my approval. Email is WAR and I am fighting for Inbox Zero. Send those emails my way lightly ... tread carefully with that send button, because you might just find your messages are unwanted and end up clearly marked as unwanted.

Insult us users all you want, trivialize us all you want, attack our behavior all you want: I DO NOT WANT UNSOLICITED EMAIL and will HAPPILY and "vindictively" (lol) mark unwanted email as "unsolicited".

I use the term "vindictive" because the people using their spam filter in this fashion feel that they are not only training a dataset, but punishing the sender: this attitude leads to behaviors that lead to feature creep on the usage of flagging things as "spam", and if you read threads related to spam you find people using the filter to mark all kinds of things they don't like, including business models they take issue with that really have nothing to do with email at all. I thereby simply think your entire rant here is nothing more than self-rationalization of behavior you know is overstepping a boundary: email is not "war", the attitude you are describing is objectively "vindictive", and I frankly find it rather disappointing that you just don't get this.

And again: I don't send email from my service; I don't even send receipts... so most i your rant is fundamentally mistargetted. I am a user who doesn't appreciate people's emotional responses to something that isn't really fixable anyway making email fundamentally more complicated as a protocol, breaking use cases like shared mailing lists (see the recent issues with Yahoo DMARC on the IETF list), and mis-training spam filters. If you ask me about real-life "actual" criminals I would frankly have similar responses against people who prefer vigilante, vindictive punishment for behaviors they dislike :/.

None of those are false positives. Spam is unsolicited mail. Did I solicit the mail?

- Yes: not spam.

- No: spam.

And, since I never solicit promotional email to my personal address, my method is 100% accurate.

In my opinion the companies sending unsolicited promotional email are the ones gaming the system taking advantage of the "well this might be unsolicited but it's not v14gr/\" grey area.

By this definition John sending an unexpected party invitation to his friend Dave is spam.

edit: I guess spam is by definition commercial email. Still, I think it's possible to have a business relationship with a company where it's acceptable for them to send an occasional email that you didn't specifically request.

Business relationships are different from personal relationships, and "solicit," in this case, does not mean literally request the email. It is perfectly reasonably to describe unexpected email from a friend as solicited and unexpected product email from a business as unsolicited (even if you've had contact with them previously).

It is unlikely that the business is your friend ;-).

"I guess spam is by definition commercial email"

That's only some definitions. There are more hardcore people who'd view anything they didn't explicitly request as 'spam', just some of it originating from people they know vs companies they know.

Personally, there are a select few brands from whom I enjoy reading unsolicited emails.

They have proven themselves to me and I like them on an irrationally human level.

What bothers me, however, is when the other 99.9% of the brands I interact with automatically assume that they are the 0.1%.

Yes, it's possible and acceptable to have that kind of relationship between a client/business, but the problem becomes when a brand believes that they can control that relationship, or define it themselves, or simply assume that it exists.

I think you need to break down SPAM this way...

SPAM = UCE + UBE.

UCE = Unsolicited Commercial Mail

UBE = Unsolicited Bulk Mail

What's common? Unsolicited.

Definitions make a big difference here.

A week or two ago I sent hundreds of messages to my customers, warning about Heartbleed and noting what measures we'd taken against it.

That mail was unsolicited. Not overtly solicited, anyway. Sure, it falls under the "we may contact you from time to time about yadda yadda" but people only know that if they actually read our Terms & Conditions. A normal person with an important mailbox and a convenient spam-button doesn't always have time for such careful consideration and nuance.

Heck, to make sure the mail reached the recipients, and to avoid getting my domain flagged (and this is for a very legitimate message!) I used a 3rd-party mail service. It sucks that I even need to do that just to communicate with my customers.

I suspect one or a few of my customers may have marked that message as spam, too. Because, whatever it was (didn't read, just glanced at subject) they didn't expect it so it must be spam.

What about solicited mail? Sure, unsolicited newsletters are annoying, but you're making it sound like NOBODY, EVER subscribes to newsletters. Sometimes, someone (who is not you) subscribes to a newsletter, and then after a period of inactivity s/he receives a newsletter but does not immediately recognize the title, and hits the Spam button out of habit. I think this is what _asciiker_ is talking about. What about cases that this?

The good news is there are plenty of ways to tune for false positives in the machine learning algorithms that underlie spam filters. I'd be surprised if email providers don't consider a flagger's flagging frequency when classifying.

As the OP said, this is just reality: people have different criteria for reporting something as spam. I could even imagine malicious users flooding false positives using bots in efforts to break spam filtering. The state of spam is so much better than it was 10-15 years ago, but it's not yet a completely solved problem.

In short, this person isn't breaking spam filtering all on his/her own--his/her use of flagging may even be arguably justified (if more liberal than average.) He/she just represents part of the problem space.

Stop blaming the victims.

These are not "false positives". Just because they are legal, and for some even common business practices, it's all spam and always has been.

Unethical business practices are causing the problem, not the few people that resist them.

It is a false positive if someone using SES to send a password reset email is marked as spam, and you are not a victim if you sign up for something that says it will send you email that you knew you didn't want when you signed up for it: that meets neither the legal nor classic definition of spam, and is mail I actually like receiving.

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