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Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

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Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#41

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

malfist wrote: post #13
lucb1e wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gmail’s AI-powered defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam How to lie with statistics :). It's not hard to block all spam if you chuck anything you're not sure about in with the false positives. It's not that Gmail is so much better, it's that they have to care less because everyone has to deal with their dominance on the market Edit: reading further > By February 2024, Gmail will start to require that bulk senders:…

I disagree with your characterization of the spam flagging and that people need to learn how to use it. If you made it hard for me to unsubscribe, ignore my unsubscribe request, or start spamming me because I did some other business with you and you think that gives you the right to send me marketing emails, I am absolutely clicking that spam button, and I am not wrong. There is a low bar for what constites spam.

I find that I don’t mind _bulk emails_ I mind having a high volume of emails in my inbox.

I’ve gotten a lot of value over the years by having marketing emails in my archive (price history, etc). What I wish gmail did was come up with a really easy system for automatically setting up a “tag and skip inbox” filter for emails.

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#42

Post by sScTE9qEMCxEk34 »

dylan604 wrote: post #28
jcrites wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that Gmail has support for the `List-Unsubscribe` mechanism [1] which provides email clients with a standardized way for a recipient to unsubscribe from the list with a button-click. I can't quickly find any documentation about this from Google directly, confirming whether they support it, but there are a lot of 3P websites discussing it. It's kind of frustrating that Google's announcement [2] explici…

>and that they process unsubscription requests within two days. what's up with this 2 days delay? it's an automated system. isn't this pretty much just updating a field in a database? are they allowing for batches in 24 hour increments? in the days of needing human assistance, i get time delays, but for automated computer systems there should be very little delay. don't get me started on why in 2023 it still takes ti…

The theory is that they might have already generated the list of subscribers when they wrote up the email days earlier, or be working off some mirror of the data, etc.

It's a really dumb theory and the real reason is "because we can and it's very slightly easier".

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#43

Post by sScTE9qEMCxEk34 »

yuliyp wrote: post #34
dylan604 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and that they process unsubscription requests within two days. what's up with this 2 days delay? it's an automated system. isn't this pretty much just updating a field in a database? are they allowing for batches in 24 hour increments? in the days of needing human assistance, i get time delays, but for automated computer systems there should be very little delay. don't get me started on why in 2023 it still takes ti…

Not everything reads from live databases. Some marketing is sent by running batch jobs against data sitting in bigquery, hadoop, etc. So even if a write to the source of truth happens at some time, a job running an hour later might not see that update. Also, you may have bulk sending tooling which throttles the rate at which messages get sent out, also slowing down responsiveness to an incoming request to unsubscribe…

foreach email_address: if email_address not in recent_unsubscribers: send_email(email_address)

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#44

Post by philistine »

jcrites wrote: post #20

> To add yet another protection, moving forward, we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under to ensure Gmail recipients aren’t bombarded with unwanted messages. This is an industry first, and as a result, you should see even less spam in your inbox. How is this an industry first? Every large receiving domain has had thresholds that they expect senders to stay under regarding the number of m…

I absolutely do not believe Google will hold themselves to the threshold they announced. Gmail will remain an inscrutable black box ... by design.

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#45

Post by Macha »

lucb1e wrote: post #22
malfist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your characterization of the spam flagging and that people need to learn how to use it. If you made it hard for me to unsubscribe, ignore my unsubscribe request, or start spamming me because I did some other business with you and you think that gives you the right to send me marketing emails, I am absolutely clicking that spam button, and I am not wrong. There is a low bar for what constites spam.

Oh sure, if it's hard to unsubscribe then I will totally use anti-spam mechanisms to block that as well. I am talking about the case where people engage the spam button for email that they (1) can unsubscribe from using the standard one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, and (2) have either explicitly signed up for or that is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and wi…

> have either explicitly signed up for or that is otherwise from a legitimate sender that complies with your local laws and will honor the unsubscripti

2 points:

I'd agree that using spam for something a user has signed up for would be unfair, but only in the sense that they understood clearly they were signing up for emails, and not, for example, a confusing opt out tick tied to their purchase. You totally deserve the spam box for that latter one.

Similarly, honouring local requirements for unsubscribe is not enough to get you out of spam reports if you didn't have a reason to email me to begin with. That you have a new product or newsletter or corporate announcement isn't good enough, but many marketing people believe it is. The fact that they can't self police is why I'm ok with email providers being strict about this.

Really the one thing I miss since moving from Gmail is the knowledge that my use of the spam button hurt deliverability for senders of spammy emails more widely than just my own inbox.

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#46

Post by dpifke »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #35
lucb1e wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I send maybe one message per month to a Gmail address and they already require having DKIM in addition to SPF since last year. One-click unsubscribe is an internet standard (RFC 8058) which they are currently not using. The article does not say that they will now use it. Presently, they manually implement that functionality for large senders. Let's see what they will actually end up doing. Agree on the last point. Al…

From googles source: > Enable easy unsubscription: You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to stop receiving unwanted messages from a particular email sender. It should take one click. So we’re requiring that large senders give Gmail recipients the ability to unsubscribe from commercial email in one click, and that they process unsubscription requests within two days. We’ve built these requirements on open standards…

One-click unsubscribe (no action beyond "visiting a single internet web page") is required under U.S. law:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

It's illegal to require users to sign in with a username and password, or click a link in a confirmation email, etc.

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#48

Post by dharmab »

dpifke wrote: post #46
SamuelAdams wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From googles source: > Enable easy unsubscription: You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to stop receiving unwanted messages from a particular email sender. It should take one click. So we’re requiring that large senders give Gmail recipients the ability to unsubscribe from commercial email in one click, and that they process unsubscription requests within two days. We’ve built these requirements on open standards…

One-click unsubscribe (no action beyond "visiting a single internet web page") is required under U.S. law: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C... It's illegal to require users to sign in with a username and password, or click a link in a confirmation email, etc.

Under that law your unsubscribe link may be a link to a web form when the user enters their address and preferences and clicks a submit button (i.e. multiple clicks)

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#49

Post by TrendyCPU »

s17n wrote: post #30
lucb1e wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gmail’s AI-powered defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam How to lie with statistics :). It's not hard to block all spam if you chuck anything you're not sure about in with the false positives. It's not that Gmail is so much better, it's that they have to care less because everyone has to deal with their dominance on the market Edit: reading further > By February 2024, Gmail will start to require that bulk senders:…

> Users do not understand the spam button is meant for spam, not for anything they don't want to receive anymore Users don't want to receive your god damned newsletter. Just stop using email as a marketing channel.

I appreciate email as a marketing channel. I sign up for several newsletters. I read them sometimes. I don't at others. If I find they offer nothing of interest or value to me, I unsubscribe. If I continue receiving emails after unsubscribing, then we have a problem.

I rarely have issues with companies which actually abide by things like the CAN SPAM Act.

Re: Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

#50

Post by [deleted] »

dharmab wrote: post #48
dpifke wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One-click unsubscribe (no action beyond "visiting a single internet web page") is required under U.S. law: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C... It's illegal to require users to sign in with a username and password, or click a link in a confirmation email, etc.

Under that law your unsubscribe link may be a link to a web form when the user enters their address and preferences and clicks a submit button (i.e. multiple clicks)

[deleted]
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