I go one step further and for the lists which I don't remember subscribing to, I never click "Unsubscribe" - it's "Spam" right away.
Works great except for the gas company, electric and water company, phone company, airlines, cloud provider, os provider, and everyone else that mixes the 5% of legit business that you can’t afford to ignore or miss with the 95% of marketing content that you want to get rid of. Since it’s usually opaque how “mark as spam” and “block” actually works, and since the origin of the mailing lists can be reconfigured any ti…
Few companies are stupid enough to use the same sender or even domain for marketing and important transactional mail.
When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…
Why don't you blame YC for this? They fund and repeatedly promote this AI email slop. There is a startup called AI SDR that send random emails who have no context. Same with Resend. Start at home before blaming others or screaming at the sky.
Oh look. Weasel boys got offended and now complaning to mommy - he was mean.
When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
In college, likely you subscribed your email (or they sneakily did it for you) as you went through your activities, like student government, on-campus jobs, signing up for classes in different departments, multiple extra curriculars, etc. If those are all designed to be their own entities, just sharing the same domain (and sometimes they're on subdomains), then each is likely claiming the right to susbcribe you to their own list. Should be illegal if they're all affiliated to the same org.
> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. The sheer number of comments that think the state of "unsubscribe" is good is... saddening. I should not have to click a link to "unsubscribe" from something that I did not subscribe to. There's no recourse for me against these thieves.
The state of Unsubscribe is good. Imagine how much worse things would be if legit businesses had no reason to make it easy to unsubscribe in such a consistent way like we do today. That other problems also exist doesn't mean this solution for this thing isn't good.
It's okay. Sometimes when you click the Unsubscribe link you have to enter your email (log in), and sometimes you have to fill out a form, which may or may not be serviceable. There is room for dark patterns here, and dark patterns are used. We're hardly out of the woods with Unsubscribe.
Gyms are notorious shysters who made it difficult to cancel your membership, even when you have the right. Don't blame the consumers for this bullshit. Do as many chargebacks as you can.
Don't sign an agreement to do something you don't want to do. It's as simple as that. It's not "blaming the consumers" for expecting people to follow the terms of contracts they sign. I never had a Gold's Gym membership for exactly this reason - their cancellation terms were onerous, I wasn't interested in complying, so I never signed and never gave them any money. If you say "well, I don't want to do that, but I'm j…
Bullshit rules are bullshit rules, the fact that something is technically legal doesn't make it morally justifiable. The default assumption of any consumer in a high trust society is that they are going to receive a fair service for the price they pay.
When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
How did it even evolve into such a mess? Cannot you just go to random gym, pay for enterance and do ya thing without signing stuff?
The gym I belong to requires both a credit card and bank routing and transfer numbers, on top of like 13 different legal documents. It is the only one I can afford within 10 minutes of my house.
Wtf? Thats crazy
In eastern eu I just enter the gym and purchase daily or monthly ticket
The big difference here is that this was created by an act of Congress, not the result of a regulatory body straining at the limits of its remit. That makes it much more likely to survive administration changes or court challenges. Even now the CAN-SPAM act feels outdated -- I do like the unsubscribe button, but I would like to see email verification made explicitly required. That in order to start emailing you, you…
I think we should go back the early web idea and just fractionally charge for email. E.g. $0.001 per email, paid to the recipient Insignificant at personal scale, but a deterrent to sending low-value emails at mass scale, and double-painful when an unbalanced flow (i.e. a spammer who receives no organic email coming in)
Unfortunately that is insignificant at the larger end too.
An accountant would just look at that, figure out the click-through rate and plug it in to weigh it up against the CPM/CTR of equivalent advertising.
And you'd lose any "ethical" arguments against spam. You'd unlock a tidal wave of companies who would now feel justified in spamming because they're paying to do so.
Just as companies don't feel ashamed to bleed adverts into every other waking space.
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
So I'm getting these emails from the KamalaHarris campaign. They're signed by the domain as well. I've never given money to the organiation, I'm not connected with their party, I've never signed up for the campaign, or interacted with them. However, I'm constantly being put on their mailing list soliciting for donations. I've seen how the campaigns pass around email addresses without consent. (Mostly from ActBlue) So…
I have two rules in gmail - one deletes any email containing the word "unsubscribe" and the other any email with the word "democrat". I probably have missed some emails, but life has somehow gone on without them.
My friend group has mostly moved to texting or other messaging apps. Email is kind of like letters in the 90's..
So what, people should only be able to email you if you've previously emailed them? How am I supposed to know who I'm allowed to email?
> So what, people should only be able to email you if you've previously emailed them? No, people should be able to email me as they would normally. I should be able to block senders, or entire domains. To use a direct example: if I decide that substack is shit because they subscribe people without consent (which is exactly true), then I should be able to block all things from substack and not just a single email addr…
When I contacted Substack about it they insisted that I can't be subscribed to a mailing list there unless I gave them my explicit consent.
Quickly going through their own documentation I found out that this is not true: Substack allows you to import CSV subscriber lists without the consent of each subscriber, ostensibly to allow painless migration of old mailing lists. That feature is of course abused, and they did nothing when I reported the abuse, presumably because spammers represent a large part of their business.