[0]https://blog.tinned-software.net/permanently-reject-a-specif...
Wow
You can really easily create aliases for specific sites or just a general spam@ alias on your own domain. Then if it gets abused you can mark all mail directed to that alias to bounce.
You could later re-enable it if you wanted to.
The thing is you don't want to completely blackhole/delete messages received at a valid randomly-generated address, but which were sent by an unexpected sender. For that, I have a separate "Suspicious" child of my main "Inbox". The main exception I've seen that falls under "Suspicious" is that Amazon shares your account's email address with their shippers; so you'll receive a Fedex delivery notification at your Amazon address, which falls under "Suspicious" because the sender address doesn't originate from Amazon.
What I find mildly strange is that, in the 2 years since I've migrated from Gmail to a super-organized and rules-based organization with Fastmail, I have literally not received a single spam email. I credit this to having migrated my GitHub account to use their privacy wrapper, so none of my commits have a personal email attached to them. I thus suspect that most developers who receive spam have had their email crawled from commits to public Git repositories.
Of course, there is a caveat: I do not expect to be able to maintain this kind of scheme into old age. There's no way, at 60-70-80-90 years of age, that I will still be mentally capable of managing a wildcard domain. So while it works for now... at some point I will need to simplify back to a single email address. Sigh... fml in advance. :(
Going back after and saying you don't exist is like answering the phone and going "nobody is home".
Edit: I suppose this ghost setting could be used for future delivery attempts though. Perhaps this is what you meant originally.
If I get another message from them, Step 2 is to setup a mail rule to put everything from their company into the Junk folder.
If the sender just added me to their list without consent? Straight to spam.
Delaying step two requires book keeping.
Immediately blocking is low effort with effect.
In few cases, where senders seem to be "proper" companies I do a GDPR request. Sometimes they provide valuable information about address brokers etc.
Translates nicely to interpersonal communication
For that reason I have no need to be “nice” to entities who send me unsolicited email. I avoid clicking any link on email I didn’t request as - just like answering the phone confirms that a live person is home - clicking “unsubscribe” just means the email address is valid and has a human behind it.
We have to stop pretending like there are humans behind our communication. If I had to guess, 99% of my email volume is generated by a machine of some sort.
If you know my email address, then put a token in the unsubscribe link so you can retrieve my address on your end, rather than making me retype it. If you don't know my email address -- maybe you are sending to a list, not to me -- then I consider you spam because you don't actually have the direct ability to remove me.
This is a real problem for us - not a made up scenario. So we remove the auto-filled email on the unsubscribe form.
Subject: "Was it something we said? crying emoji". Body: "If you want to go... we won't stop you. [...]" Footer: "You're receiving this email because [...] subscribed to Firefox Account Tips.
Yeah, thanks for the ~~tip~~ spam.
Felt like going through one of those dark pattern flows that Spotify or Amazon have when you try to unsubscribe from their paid plans, trying to guilt you into reconsidering.
Legitimate mailing lists have problems with people forwarding emails, when the recipients of the forwarded emails click the unsubscribe button, they will unsubscribe the original recipient who didn’t want to be unsubscribed.
I think the better approach is simply showing the "Intended for johndoe@example.com" next to Unsubscribe, but I could see why they ask for your email.
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:list@host.com?subject=unsubscribe>
I don't see why you have to involve the web at all, but I can tell you that if I have to go through a bunch of bullshit when I want to unsubscribe I'll just mark it as spam instead. However appreciated and anticipated your newsletter is, you have to consider that most newsletter subscriptions are probably either accidental (failed to uncheck some box when signing up for something entirely different) or straight up unsolicited, and people like me will basically purge all their subscriptions without discrimination regularly as the crap builds up.
https://twitter.com/mohd_irteza/status/1227772431605149696?s...
https://twitter.com/zachalberico/status/1247951473876422656?...
It's basically impossible to know if you've done the right thing.
> Sorry for any confusion. Select the box next to each desired communication option or deselect to stop communications.
So... if I uncheck the “unsubscribe” button that stops communications?!?
Marriott Bonvoy Assist @MBonvoyAssist 9 Apr Replying to @zachalberico Sorry for any confusion. Select the box next to each desired communication option or deselect to stop communications
Now I think I understand what they are saying, but it’s not a great explanation either. A new sentence before the ‘or’ would have been helpful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do I add them back or not?
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.
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.
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.
If people start unsubscribing by hitting spam, then those users who still want to receive the mailing may have to search for it in their spam boxes.
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.
Whereas mine is pretty reliably never sending false positives to my spam folder. Fastmail wins again.
The engagement and conversion rate on email is so low that the volume continually increases to convert further.
I typically report companies that violate this (Chase, I’m looking at you with your “transactional” emails that are just thinly veiled ads) to the FCC (there’s an online report form) but I don’t know how much it helps.
You use unsubscribe for anyone with which you have some sort of prior relationship. Anything else is spam, report it and move on.
Sometimes it's understandable that someone wants to simply filter these mails as spam than go through whatever convoluted process they have in mind for unsubscribe. It's easier and discourages the practice of signing people up to random newsletters.
Years ago I worked at a large email service provider for bulk mailings on behalf of large customers and we took unsubscribes very seriously.
And for the really truly spam/scam emails, the unsub link is the least of your concerns since delivery and tracking pixels confirm the address is real and being used. The true spam usually doesn't even have an unsub link. In those cases mark as spam and hope that your email provider starts flagging them as spam before it ever makes it to your inbox in the future.
I'm an aggressive unsubscriber and 99% of the time it works. Very little junk flows into my inbox these days.
Does it work in Gmail? Since it doesn't load images until I athorize: https://i.imgur.com/RZ93VIU.png
I use Thunderbird, which doesn't load that stuff.
I'd rather receive the mail and let Gmail put it into a blackhole than try to solve the problem upstream myself and have the small possibility that I either miss a newsletter and get spam anyway, or tip off some system that my email address is "real".
Unsubscribe is your best bet as honoring opt-outs are protected by the CAN-SPAM act.
The issue is that there are good-faith and bad-faith unsubscribe links. Clicking the unsubscribe button can thus either have a good outcome (less junk mail) or a bad outcome I ardently want to avoid (letting a spammer know my address is active).
I'm sure Google knows this and does some verification and detection to try to prevent that bad outcome, but as an end user, I don't have much visibility into how well that works. It's a hard problem, but Google is smart, so it's possible they've solved it, but I don't really know whether they actually have.
So in practice, I always read over the email in question carefully to try to judge for myself whether it's safe to click the unsubscribe link at the bottom. It's annoying, but the effort seems worth it.
> This only works for some senders right now. We’re actively encouraging senders to support auto-unsubscribe — we think 100% should. We won’t provide the unsubscribe option on messages from spammers: we can’t trust that they’ll actually unsubscribe you, and they might even send you more spam. So you’ll only see the unsubscribe option for senders that we’re pretty sure are not spammers and will actually honor your unsubscribe request.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-easy...
Sounds like they were advocating a solution to spam [1]. I wonder why it didn't work...
Honest question- why does this really matter? Or at least matter to any degree where you would rather have more junk mail than potentially stop spam/undesired emails.
If a spammer sends out 1000 emails and gets 100 bouncebacks.. then they keep on sending to the other 900. You are one of those 900 and you click unsubscribe.. sure, they can detect that your email is active. But are they really going to stop sending to otherwise? It's not like people are constantly changing email addresses these days.. if I were a spammer and I had a valid list, I would basically assume that's a valid email if I don't get a bounceback.
So I just don't get how detecting that someone attempted to unusbscribe is that much of a 'tell'.
I cannot vouch for the story but it looked as legit as the average HN story back then so it might be true (or not).
1) if I never signed up goes immediately to SPAM
2) if I did signed up I make the effort of going through their unsubscribe procedure
3) if I still get emails after (2) goes to SPAM
Profit!
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
Each violation of the CAN SPAM act can be met with huuuuuuuuge fines.
1) If I never signed up goes immediately to SPAM.
2) If I did signed up I make the effort of going through their unsubscribe procedure.
3.1) If I still get e-mails after (2), I file a request for my personal data under the GDPR (EU citizen here).
3.2) Once I got that, I use the GDPR to delete all of the data associated with my account / e-mail address.
4) If I still get e-mails after (3), it goes to SPAM.
With step 3, I hope that I can make them notice their bad behaviour. My goal is to drive up the costs of that behaviour (so they get incentivised to change it). Also, I'm generally interested in the personal data that a service has associated with me.
It costs them nothing to process your request - you're wasting far more of your time crafting the request than of theirs.
* Message body contains "unsubscribe" -> Skip inbox, archive
* Message body contains "webinar" -> Skip inbox, mark as spam
If they use a reputable bulk mailing service instead of using their first-party domain then they are indistinguishable from a phishing attack.
With most bulk mailing services, the message will come from the "first-party domain". They will have configured that service as a legitimate sender for the domain via SPF/DKIM DNS records.
It's a bit ironic to complain about getting unwanted emails from a bunch of users when they're literally just replies to unwanted emails that you sent them
Gmail has over a billion active users. Mailing lists will probably adapt to whatever crumbs Google leaves on the doorstep.
Now that's your problem right there. _Don't_ use Gmail. You're not just giving up your own privacy, you're hurting the privacy of everyone who corresponds with you. There are plenty of non-US free email providers, and many/most of them are at the very least much better than Google in this respect.
Also _use a mail client_, not your browser. Thunderbird, KMail, evolution - even (ugh) Outlook.
I'd rather have my data in the hands of Google -- a company with strong compliance and the world's best non-government infosec outfit -- than in the hands of any of the other companies listed.
"best non-government infosec outfit" - but that outfit is not securing your information _from_ Google, the US government or Google's business parties; it secures it from other individuals and unaffiliated organizations.
I tend to use the checkboxes to mark groups of emails as spam, then also chosen "unsubscribe me" without checking where they came from (since I don't want to open them).
When it happens to be spam sent to a mailing list, this feature unsubscribes you from the mailing list. When it's a Google group you moderate, good bye moderator status! Oops! (Filed a bug internally about this, no status updates so far.)
> without checking where they came from
I appreciate the post because after revisiting it, I think that info was gathered from a few-years-old blog discussing a specific limit in (maybe?) Gmail, but it sounds like it can be broken down into multiple lines.
See e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20180605011201/https://www.list-... for a better example.
Gmail needs to handle that in a much better way to ensure they end up in spam for everyone else.
I'm not hitting unsubscribe if I didn't subscribe in the first place because it sends a signal to the sender that I don't want them to get.
You can also contact the company directly and ask to be removed from their list.
I think the author missed adding a hyperlink in the summary at "You can check the source of an email to do this - here's a guide on how to do that. "
Occasionally, I'll sign up for something new, and get spam and then I have to do it all over again.
we need Rules on gmail... filters do the labelin work but they dont actually move the mails
is that not what you meant?
I had to dive into this a bit for something and work and it’s just fascinating how much effort has been spent in trying to combat spam, build a reputation based system for emails etc. And this article does an amazing job of explaining list-unsubscribe...although the RFC is pretty easy to read too!
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
There's and RFC for List-Unsubscribe headers.
What it does is show an Unsubscribe button above the email, which loads the unsubscribe URL into a small web panel below it.
Then I started clicking "block this address" from another drop-down - never got any new mail. Much recommended approach.
If it's a newsletter I actually signed up for, I respect that and will unsubscribe, but the majority is unsolicited spam where a company feels is OK because I happened to have bought a product they can now email me 8 times a day.
