Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

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Your comment is insane! "If your ToS say I agree to receive mail, guess what? I don't agree, I just want to try your product. I'll flag you in a breeze."

So you don't agree to the terms you just read before giving out your email address. That's insane! It's like smiling and saying to a guy, "Here's my number", and not saying: "But if you call me, for any reason, I will report you for harrassment", without any indication that this is how you feel. Absolutely insane.

Why would you give out your email address with that attitude? "Here is my email address, but the only thing you should use it for is to let me ruin your communications with others who agree to the same thing I just agreed to, if I receive anything I might conceivably have given it to you for."

If you don't want to get ANYTHING, EVER, then what is the purpose of giving out a means to communicate with you??? What did you think you are doing by giving out an email address??

It's just so bizarre. Do the world a favor and register an email address for what you consider spam, which is everything.

Then never look at it again, while that email address gets invitations and calls to publish in journals, updates on the product offerings you are interested in, informative newsletters, free money on things that you're already spending on, and so forth... while you get nothing.

Boy you sure are showing them though!

> It's like smiling and saying to a guy, "Here's my number", and not saying: "But if you call me, for any reason, I will report you for harrassment", without any indication that this is how you feel.

Absolutely, and what's worse is that people marking ham as spam means that email providers can't take a spam report as seriously as they otherwise might, thus reducing the potential benefits of a 'report as spam' feature.

So we all get more spam because some people misuse 'report as spam'.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Someone giving out an email address that not only implicitly establishes a relationship of them emailing you, but explicitly even has a ToS about it, and then getting some mail on topic to that relationsihp, is absolutely not spam.

Maybe downvoter didn't get that you're using ham as meaning non-spam.

If you signed up for the ham, and it has an unsubscribe, it's absolutely immoral to flag it and deprive other people of the benefit.

I wonder what would happen to false spam reports like the GP's if every email field had a button next to it, "Don't ever email me, I don't know why I'm even giving you this." (i.e. "I'm insane.")

EDIT: cleared up that the ToS isn't what establishes the relationship - the fact that you're giving them your email does.

To be fair, if the permission to receive mail is buried in TOS, then I'd consider it spam too. So I guess I attached my point to the wrong comment.

But I know from industry experience that some people who explicitly sign up to mailing lists then go on to report those emails as spam, and this dilutes the effectiveness of 'report as spam' features.

The ToS is just one example. If you're giving out your email address to be an early trier of a new product, there's an implicit ToS that you can receive some news about it.

An unsubscribe button = "now stop emailing me." i.e. the opposite action of signing up and giving out an email.

flagging the kinds of things OP talks about after giving out your email address is ridiculous. Giving out your email address is opting in to communication initiated by the other side, without further requests - otherwise you wouldn't be giving out your email address, they would be giving you theirs: "Email us to get a reply with our newsletter" or whatever else the OP imagines in this bizarro-world where you opt in to a specific communication.

> If you're giving out your email address to be an early trier of a new product, there's an implicit ToS that you can receive some news about it.

And that's why I wouldn't flag them, because I solicited the email.

But I wasn't talking about that case. And you know it. Please stop.

you listed it explicitly (your third bullet point in the original comment)

I'm going to mention that at one point my company produced a custom product^, that cost 100's of dollars per purchase, and was only delivered via a single email. We had those emails marked as spam on numerous occasions.

To this day we have never sent a marketing email, or even non-transactional email - mainly because we suck at marketing, so it's not like they got confused about which email...

^ We do audio transcription, a customer sends an mp3 in, we have someone listen and type it up, and we emailed the customer the results. These days you can collect the transcripts from the website, but for years you couldn't.

Perhaps they signed up using a shared alias (marketing@...) and when you delivered the results, the original customer was happy but someone else on the alias marked it as spam.

You're one of those people that thinks everyone should read and be bound by EULAs, aren't you?

It's actually like I were asked for my number to get a service and then the company started calling me twice a day to offer me things I don't even want or care for because it falls within their carefully-worderd-ToS.

Do I agree to get emails sent to me from <random company> as long as they're product-related and I'm using their service? Yes I do. Will I mark these as spam? No I won't.

Do I agree to getting promotional emails or reminder emails when I stopped using their service months ago? No I don't. Will I mark these as spam? Yes I will.

But do you even try clicking unsubscribe?

What you're describing is just so different from real spam.

> What you're describing is just so different from real spam.

Not at all, check this other post of mine on why I think it's still spam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7621722

The reply to that post states pretty clearly why you're wrong.

I'm curious though - after you give out your email address, which you don't consider "soliciting" in this sense but I do, how do you imagine "soliciting" any specific communication?

Nothing can possibly be 'solicited' under your definition.

I just don't get why you even give out an email address, if anything you get thereafter is still considered unsolicited.

> The reply to that post states pretty clearly why you're wrong.

And then states pretty clearly why I'm not in his "EDIT" which you chose to ignore.

> I just don't get why you even give out an email address

Because you pretty much have to buy anything online nowadays.

My personal solution is to use the '+' trick to give customized emails out to everyone and then to block them at the SMTP level in my /etc/mail/access file if they don't stop sending mails after the 1st unsubscribe attempt.

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