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Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

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Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#261

Post by mook »

actualwitch wrote: post #134
mook wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bank sends (non-transactional) email to me with an unsubscribe link, then magically I get sent more even after going through the whole thing (to the screen where they confirm everything has been unsubscribed). It's hard to confirm externally that things worked.

Google probably tracks all clicks on links in mail. It is easy to see that unsubscribe was clicked, and then more mail that you mark as spam came.

That's the thing — it's my bank and it does have transactional mail too. I don't expect Google to be able to tell between those.

It's nudging me towards switching banks.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#262

Post by illiac786 »

simscitizen wrote: post #211

Mandatory DMARC basically breaks all e-mail forwarding services (SPF doesn't survive forwarding due to modification of Return-Path). I think ARC/RFC8617 is supposed to be the fix for that, but it's not even standardized yet. This seems like a rather big issue?

That is a massive problem for me indeed, if true.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#263

Post by illiac786 »

TheCycoONE wrote: post #25

DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are old hat and implemented by anyone serious for years. What's buried in this article is the required https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 support for one-click unsubscribe posts. I don't see many messages in my inbox yet with that.

How does that interact with crawlers, like what Microsoft does? (They visit every link in every email it seems) does it automatically unsubscribes you by error then?

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#264

Post by codalan »

anticorporate wrote: post #257
codalan wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder if their mindset is, "Hey, even if only .05% engage w/ the marketing email, that's still > 0%!". Maybe their mindset should really be, "Hey, we're annoying 99.95% of our users who did not consent to these emails, and > 50% will be turned off to our product and will associate our brand to that of a needy, attention-grabbing parasite". If I wanted these emails, I would have opted in. Instead, not onl…

> If your sales and marketing team insist on these tactics, you need to fire them and hire people who get it. So, full disclosure, in addition to being kind of an anti-spam zealot, my day job is running marketing operations at a big-ish software company. So I get the fun job of telling everyone from the junior intern to the senior VP that no, my team is not going to send that email for you. That no, in fact, I don't…

Sounds like you get it. It's unfortunate more people don't follow this mentality.

And there's no incentive to stop this. When email inboxes turn into marketing dumpsters, it just drives users to WhatsApp/Discord/FB Messenger/Slack/etc. for communication, which is good for those affiliated companies, but is bad for open platforms.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#265

Post by kragen »

LinAGKar wrote: post #92
cameldrv wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring the user to login to unsubscribe also has the nice effect of requiring them to know the password, otherwise they have to go through the reset procedure. Of course you need to be really secure and do 2FA as well. Hey, if this reduces the number of people who successfully unsubscribe, don't blame me, I'm just over here trying to make sure things are secure!

Not only that, it also requires then to accept your EULA/Privacy Policy before you let them unsubscribe.

requiring web access to subscribe or unsubscribe is unacceptable

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#266

Post by kragen »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #255
kragen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also it violates longstanding security measures against malicious prank unsubscribes; it means that if you forward an email list message to someone else, they can unsubscribe you without your consent as a prank

> it means that if you forward an email list message to someone else, they can unsubscribe you without your consent as a prank Surely that is a bug in the email client that forwarded the email. It should have replaced the headers, including List-Unsubscribe, with its own. That looks to be what's happened in the emails I receive. The one exception would be if someone forwarded an email as an attachment, but in practic…

what does your user interface for interacting with the list-unsubscribe header look like?

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#267

Post by actualwitch »

mook wrote: post #261
actualwitch wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google probably tracks all clicks on links in mail. It is easy to see that unsubscribe was clicked, and then more mail that you mark as spam came.

That's the thing — it's my bank and it does have transactional mail too. I don't expect Google to be able to tell between those. It's nudging me towards switching banks.

I don't use google mail much, but fastmail seems to be capable of making fine-grained judgements on transactional/promotional mail coming from the same address. I reckon google will be able to do it too, certainly easier than changing banks.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#268

Post by ubermonkey »

jdhawk wrote: post #245
ubermonkey wrote: post #168

Mailgun is a spammer, so, like, cry me a river? I have them blocked at the server level because of how much spam they were sending me. They clearly do zero enforcement of opt-in.

how are they supposed to enforce it?

Not really my problem.

But any bulk mailer that doesn't solve that problem is by definition a spam engine, and should probably be blocked at the ISP level.

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