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Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#161
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has that ever happened?

That's an extremely broad question. Are you asking specifically about email replacements, communication standards, or just proprietary software in general?

When has ever a “tech industry’s ‘reenvisioning’ of a free/cheap older, but universal, standard” resulted in “an open and free standard” and not “the usual bullshit vendor lock in”?

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#162
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My nearest neighbor is more than a quarter mile away. In a two-mile radius, I have less than a dozen "neighbors", and yet somehow, I have a NextDoor account that I receive spam emails about.

Do the content previews in the emails look like they're for your area, or could it be someone with a similar name registered somewhere else with the wrong email address and NextDoor never validated the email address? I hate it when companies allow people to signup with email addresses that aren't theirs, never validate the email address, and then start spamming me. I mark all of those as spam. The latest offender is…

I have a lastfirst@gmail and the fellow owning firstlast@gmail has occasionally used my email address by accident.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#163
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing email from an account you chose to sign up for may well be unwanted, but it isn’t entirely unsolicited. And it’s not at all the same as spam from companies that you haven’t interacted with. There are problems with reporting any and all email you don’t want as spam, especially when you’ve done business with that company. That devalues the meaning of spam and it will cause email providers and spam filter prov…

The Report Spam button informs both the ISP (i.e. Gmail) and the ESP (sender, usually someone like Mailchip or Mailgun) that I do not want this message in a process known as a Feedback Loop [0]. This allows the ISP to ding the ESP a bit on the reputation of their IP address (assuming enough spam complaints). It also allows the ESP to tell their customer who is sending on their platform that they are sending badly, an…

We are our own ESP at work and I work on the email team. When we get a (few) FBL from you, we block you from receiving any of our email whatsoever. Forgot your password or want to contact support? Oh well, we won’t spam you again. There are unsubscribe links, use those unless it really is unsolicited spam.

What I find most interesting about email is how some people will mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email. We send over a billion emails a month (not spam) and people’s behavior around email is fascinating.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#164

Because it works. Still relevant, from Microsoft Research: "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?" This approach suggests an answer to the question in the title. Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduc…

Isn't the gullibility scale a spectrum though? Perhaps if the emails sent purportedly originated in nations of higher repute, he would scam all of the most gullible people and in addition, some less gullible people, resulting in a greater profit. After all the marginal cost of sending out extra emails is basically free. It's not as if he needs to only select the most gullible people to save on costs.

I think it's not just that you need somebody really gullible - it's that you need somebody both gullible, and dead-set on not feeling like they've been fooled. Extremely gullible, desperate, mentally ill people are more likely to stick, even when they get hints or straight assessments that it's a scam.

At least, that was the impression I got from an old lady who lived near me, who managed to shout down a stream of people telling her that her 'secret agent boyfriend from plymouth' she was sending all her money to wasn't real.

I think there's a bit of a parallel to cults like scientology - the more incrementally ridiculous you make the story, the higher the feeling of shame is when you have to own up to being fooled, making some people go in deeper rather than back out.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#165
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has that ever happened?

That's an extremely broad question. Are you asking specifically about email replacements, communication standards, or just proprietary software in general?

Basically anything? When was the last time something like email happened? And it wasn't a giant tech company that created that either.

Maybe something like Webrtc?

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Report Spam button informs both the ISP (i.e. Gmail) and the ESP (sender, usually someone like Mailchip or Mailgun) that I do not want this message in a process known as a Feedback Loop [0]. This allows the ISP to ding the ESP a bit on the reputation of their IP address (assuming enough spam complaints). It also allows the ESP to tell their customer who is sending on their platform that they are sending badly, an…

We are our own ESP at work and I work on the email team. When we get a (few) FBL from you, we block you from receiving any of our email whatsoever. Forgot your password or want to contact support? Oh well, we won’t spam you again. There are unsubscribe links, use those unless it really is unsolicited spam. What I find most interesting about email is how some people will mark email as spam literally months or years af…

> mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email When a persistently spammy company compels me to open the Rules page to filter their trash, you bet I’m also going to Select-All and Report As Junk in hopes of maximally dinging their reputation. No idea if it works, but there’s one explanation :)

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#167
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing email from an account you chose to sign up for may well be unwanted, but it isn’t entirely unsolicited. And it’s not at all the same as spam from companies that you haven’t interacted with. There are problems with reporting any and all email you don’t want as spam, especially when you’ve done business with that company. That devalues the meaning of spam and it will cause email providers and spam filter prov…

The Report Spam button informs both the ISP (i.e. Gmail) and the ESP (sender, usually someone like Mailchip or Mailgun) that I do not want this message in a process known as a Feedback Loop [0]. This allows the ISP to ding the ESP a bit on the reputation of their IP address (assuming enough spam complaints). It also allows the ESP to tell their customer who is sending on their platform that they are sending badly, an…

While this is a reasonably accurate picture of what happens when you hit the report spam button, you’ve left open a somewhat false dichotomy that is quite central to the mis-categorizing of marketing email as spam. Checking in the opt-in button takes on several forms, an extremely common one of which is signing up for a service where the opt-in button is in the terms or other fine print, it is not always (or even usually) a default-off explicit and separate button click somewhere. There is often, and with most good companies, an explicit opt-out button somewhere. That is what should be used before reporting spam, if we want spam filtering to remain reasonably good.

You’ve described what happens when you report spam, but not what happens in the future when more people get upset over email and reflexively report all marketing email for accounts they chose to sign up for, and opted-in to marketing email for (by agreeing to the terms), and potentially still need transactional emails for. The average person doesn’t know the difference between transactional email and marketing email, and if you follow @Old_Thrashbarg’s advice to report any email you didn’t expect as spam before adjusting your settings, then eventually we might lose those settings as companies and providers all come to the conclusion that people can’t be bothered.

You’re also suggesting that there’s some broad segment of good marketing email that people don’t consider unsolicited or even spammy, which is by and large not true. There is practically no such thing as highly intentful ads that most people want, aside from the occasional short-lived viral campaign. By definition, marketing is a push initiated by the company to sell their wares, and most people would prefer not to watch ads given the choice.

Don’t forget that Mailchimp, Mailgun, Gmail, Hotmail, and almost every other service you can name here is actively making their income from email marketing. As much as we want to, it’s going to be difficult to block all marketing email, and they all have a vested interest in delivering email, especially from the people who are paying for the service.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#169
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extremely broad question. Are you asking specifically about email replacements, communication standards, or just proprietary software in general?

When has ever a “ tech industry’s ‘reenvisioning’ of a free/cheap older, but universal, standard ” resulted in “ an open and free standard ” and not “ the usual bullshit vendor lock in ”?

Never that I can think of, which is why I stated my hope that it wouldn't be like that. But maybe that just means we can't necessarily depend on a profit motivated corporation to do the 'reenvisioning'

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#170
I don’t think it’s as bad as it used to be. In the early 2000s I managed an email server (which was also running GNU mailman to provide mailing lists) and spam was a real problem. In 2015, I started self-hosting (Postfix, Dovecot) using my personal domain name and I was surprised at how little spam I was getting. All I had to do to stop the spam was to enable grey-listing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting_(email)
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