I try to be reasonable here. If it's something from a business I transacted with in the past or recognize the name, I will unsubscribe. I don't consider it spam. And I don't want to hurt their reputation.
I do keep track of if I already unsubscribed from a related list. Sometimes "unsubscribe from all" is completely ignored. Which really angers me.
If it's a random, clearly bought newsletter list from a related list, it depends on my mood. Likely spam.
Other notorious example: business A founder also founds (unrelated) business B. They just email their entire A client base with zero association to A. Big peeve of mine.
-- Edits (some more ramblings) --
My personal favorite: the "I want to receive marketing email" checkbox that rechecks if you have an unrelated issue with your transaction. Say, invalid CC details.
Still, even with these boxes, I think my standard is just: "I did business with them, I will get at least 1 marketing email. I'm ok with that. I will unsubscribe and not hear from them again." Anything past that is unacceptable.
To be clear: that's not how I think it should be. It's just how businesses, even small, genuine mom and pop shops, have been taught to operate. It's cultural.
It reminds me a lot of tipping in the US. I'm vehemently anti-tipping "culture" because a standard 20% is the opposite of rewarding for performance. But I still tip at a baseline of 18%+.
It's too ingrained. And I'm not going to protest by not tipping and try to change it.
I think we've come too far unless changed by law or restaurant management. Same goes for marketing emails.
I try to be a little more reasonable here. If it's a business that required me to sign up to do business with them and didn't allow me to opt out of their marketing emails then I have no problem whatsoever clicking the Spam button. And, if their marketing emails go to a third party domain -- such as a bulk emailer -- then it goes into the Phishing bucket regardless of whether or not I opted out of their marketing emails.
So much of my “spam” is from services I definitely signed up for because I have a legit use for, Or product I’m glad to pay a fair price for, but they never even asked if I wanted to get emails from them during signup/checkout-the emails just start coming in.
I suspect it's because it works for enough people that it pays off.
Every now and then I forget how annoying it was last time, and I think it would be nice to donate money to some sort of charity, and then they proceed to spam me for the following year. A couple years later I forget about he experience, and the cycle begins again.
I experienced this after donating money and volunteering a few days to support a local public defense charity for people who can’t afford legal representation, but then I started getting emails from other charities. I once decided to let this ride and see how far that email address would go (signed up using a gmail account with a “+charity_name”).
In the span of two years the following happened:
* Original Charity I actually donated money to started emailing me
* then a second local charity I did NOT donate money to
* then I began getting messages from a local political candidate who was friendly with first charity
* soon after that Another local political candidate
* Then a statewide political action committee.
At no point in that original donation flow was I ever even asked “can we email you other communications?” I presume the “we will share your email with anyone we damn well please” was baked into whatever boilerplate privacy policy existed in the background of the site they used to collect and process donation payments. Which is a whole other problem.
Is “getting out of hand” a hyperbolic reaction to how cavalier the use of mailing lists and newsletters have become when people sign up just to use a personal finance app or donate to causes?
I donated $20 to doctors without borders four years ago (a friend wanted that in lieu of bday presents). I've since gotten close to 50 letters from them and other charities. That cost far outweighs the $20 I gave them.
Because people like the GP and the GGP click "Spam" instead of the unsubscribe link/process for these services. (I do the same if I can't unsubscribe easily.) Any service that requires me to login to unsubscribe, rather than provide a tokenized unsubscribe link in the email, can suck it.
I try to be reasonable here. If it's something from a business I transacted with in the past or recognize the name, I will unsubscribe. I don't consider it spam. And I don't want to hurt their reputation.
I'm the same way. Except for two: Staples and eBay.
Staples will send me three e-mails asking me to review a product that I ordered, but that Staples hasn't even shipped to me yet. Spam.
Recently I purchased one item from eBay using the Guest Checkout feature because I don't have an eBay account, and don't want one. Now eBay sends me e-mails all the time. In order to unsubscribe, I'm instructed to sign in to an account I don't have. Spam.
People abusing their existing platforms is a huge problem; the incentives are all wrong.
This is an extremely common annoyance of mine with Kickstarter campaigns. I back a lot of projects, and it's insane how many creators abuse the "project updates" system to promote other projects, often totally unrelated and from totally different creators. They're clearly getting paid for these promotions. I can't just "unsubscribe" from the updates because I do need to be aware of "real" updates that may require my input/action.
And many apps that rely on push-notifications for their core functionality are polluting these streams with ads. Uber basically admits this: they send ride updates by sms because they know people turn off their ad-filled push notifications.
My town is also using its covid-emergency-updates sms system to advertise local composting.
This is becoming an acceptable practice, and it seems impossible to filter the cruft.
I take a very hands on approach with these people.
They get a mail saying one more spam from them and I will ensure I never buy anything they make again, add them to blacklists and tell other people they are spammers.
They tend to go the attack/whine route about being a struggling entrepreneur, and I try to educate. Of the ones who actually engage, about 1/3 seem to come around, which I consider a pretty good rate. (I follow through with the rest. They're just shithead spammers.)
> Other notorious example: business A founder also founds (unrelated) business B.
The worst for me is if you donate to one political campaign, once, you will be on every mailing list for every single candidate in that party for every single election; in every single country, state, county, province, parish, district, or city; forever.
I know that's how politics works today, but, Jesus, the #1 thing making me not want to participate in one of the major parties is this.
> If it's something from a business I transacted with in the past or recognize the name, I will unsubscribe. I don't consider it spam.
I do consider it spam, unless the email is actually about a previous transaction. I don't equate doing a transaction with a business with permission for them to bother me about something unrelated.
> Sometimes "unsubscribe from all" is completely ignored. Which really angers me.
I have a big problem with this and never know what to do.
Person buys my course after following newsletters for a while. All good.
I put them on a followup list that helps guide them through the course and keep them on track. All good.
They get a newsletter they don’t like and unsubscribe.
Now they stop getting followup guidance emails for the course. This is a problem. Almost certain not what they wanted to happen either. But okay I honor it.
A while later I make a huge update to the course or migrate to a new platform. I need to tell every buyer that their account is moving. But some have unsubscribed from all emails.
> Now they stop getting followup guidance emails for the course.
This might be the ex-marketer coming out in me, but surely the course guidance emails could be considered transactional to the service and be honoured by a different opt-in/out policy to the newsletter?
> I need to tell every buyer that their account is moving
Again, this use case isn't marketing, and should very much be allowed as a requirement to keep people informed about the use of their data. In the same way a "change password" email is allowed to be sent.
From the sidelines, I'd think the answer is that your email platform should have that feature, or you should consider using entirely separate flows/tools for transactional emails and marketing emails. Not a lawyer, but AFAIK transactional emails are not subject to Spam rules & don't even need to have an "Unsubscribe" link. Mixing the two is just causing yourself needless pain.
Why would unsubscribing from your newsletter stop them from accessing the content? Is the content only delivered via the newsletter from which they unsubscribed?
Github notifications that you signed up for but now don't want any more aren't spam.
Marking them as spam messes with Github's deliverability to all GMail users and may prevent you from getting notifications in your inbox in the future if you decide to sign up again.
Should I be concerned with how Google treats my signal globally? Honest question. If I were Google I'd recognize that how the email is stopped before getting to a user's inbox probably won't matter to them and factor that into how the unsubscribe and mark as spam buttons work. As a user I expect my treatment of "mark as spam" on a GitHub notification to be more heavily weighted in my personal spam algorithm than the global spam algorithm.
I don't think anyone outside Google knows the exact details, but GMail clearly calculates a global reputation score for each sender that is influenced by what percentage of recipients mark its messages as spam. Then there's some additional weighting on top of that based on your personal actions.
Additionally most reputable email senders have a "feedback loop" set up with Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo where clicking that Report Spam button actually passes your email address back to the sender's email system. For example if you click Report Spam on one of our email newsletters in GMail, we will flag your record in our database and not send you any more messages even if you specifically sign up for a newsletter in the future. (Please don't test this.)
When you ark it as spam it helps train google's spam fighting that mail like that is spam.
Now if it's unsolicited stuff -- SPAM -- no problem. But if it's a list you once signed up for and now no longer want, you're telling google -- for everyone -- that mail like that is spam. Even people who signed up for it (like you did) and still want it. That's unfair to the company and unfair to all those other people too.
But someone randomly blasting you with crap as is the usual case (and I includes that company you once did business with and who signed you up without your permission): that's what the spam button is for.
Personal preference, but I feel like unsubscribing or hitting spam is you sending your sentiment back to the sender in two different ways.
If you unsubscribe you're saying that you're no longer interested in the list, you see the merit but don't want to receive it any more for whatever reason.
If you hit spam you're saying this email should never have come to me, or I don't want to expend the effort to stop it from coming to me.
If the sender makes unsubscribing as easy as hitting spam (by making sure the Gmail unsub button works for example) then they make it more likely for their recipients to send the appropriate feedback - ie not hit the spam button.
Spam doesn't remove you from the senders email list.
While many senders will remove people who hit spam on their emails but not all do it. After a while, emails could be getting past the spam filter again.
Unsubscribing is usually more effective at stopping unwanted emails from any semi legitimate company as they are required by law to honor it.
If you want double protection, you can always do both.
Especially since in many instances, you don't actually want a dialogue with the spammer. I don't want to 'unsubscribe' myself given that I didn't 'subscribe' myself in the first place. Also, why would I let the spammer know that I read the email and my email is active?
In this case, you're doing the right thing: you didn't ask for it, it's spam. Presumably, you classifying it as spam helps the spam filter learn and apply that knowledge to others' inboxes, too.
They still come to me when I hit spam, and the unsubscribe button doesn't always work either. I still find myself using the distributors unsubscribe button most of the time.
For the mailing list owner, that's a risk that comes with sending out spam. If I have no prior relationship with a company, then I have no reason not to mark an email as spam. If I have a prior relationship with a company, but they are sending out unrequested emails, then I should mark it as spam. For example, if an email address is provided for package delivery updates, but is then used for unrequested periodic advertisements, that is spam.
In that case, I do have an obligation to unsubscribe rather than reporting the email as spam. I view the "report spam" button as a form of punishment, meant to disincentivize bad behavior. Misuse of email addresses should come with the risk of having all emails marked as spam. Losing interest in a mailing list that previously interested me is an expected result over time, and would not be appropriate to report as spam.
Yes, but GP was asking about consequences of clicking the spam button vs just unsubscribing. Sure if you start getting unsolicited emails, by all means click that Spam button. However, if you're just tired of getting delivery updates just unsubscribe.
I generally click "unsubscribe" in the email, then if I have to do more than click a big, obvious confirmation button on that page I close the tab and flag it as spam.
Fun fact: at least in the US, the CAN-SPAM law is actually pretty specific about how unsubscribe pages work. If it requires more than typing your email address and clicking a button then it is probably not compliant.
Why are they even allowed to make you type your email address? I used different email addresses for everything I sign up for so I have to go back to the email to see what I used. Very inconvenient.
This is why I'm glad I use an email service with a personalized spam filter. Gmail's spam filter too heavily assumes one person's spam is everyone's spam.
Whereas mine is pretty reliably never sending false positives to my spam folder. Fastmail wins again.
> exponentially worse than the physical mail system used to be
Really? Ignoring the "Spam" folder (which I never check), I get way less junk email than snail mail. And the snail mail is reliably 95% unsolicited garbage.
To be fair, Fastmail lets you set rules to route stuff to Junk, whereas USPS actively facilitates routing garbage to your mailbox [0].
You must be older because I've found my parents get a lot of junk mail. My wife and I get very little junk mail though we also rarely provide our physical address.
I get tons of email, a lot of it being spam. I've had my email address for well over a decade.
This. We order lots of stuff online, and I'd guess our info has been resold to 3rd parties many times. I provide a PO box whenever possible, but if something is being shipped...
What about a mailing list you signed up for and enjoyed at first, but lost interest after one year? Was that email always spam? Is it spam now?
Not all messages that get put into the spam folder are actually spam. There’s a wide variety of emails that aren’t spam, but also aren’t necessarily wanted anymore either. Those are the ones this article is focusing on. Make it easy for your readers to unsubscribe so they don’t call you spam.
