I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type. (Edit: Also, everything requiring a notification - by e-mail if they couldn't get me to install their app - just to get me to engage with their site.)

Once such behavior has the potential of landing your entire domain in the spam folder, maybe they'll be more careful.

Edit: For example, I can't imagine LinkedIn being able to pull of their "phish people, steal their address book, spam each contact three times with no opt-out" bullshit for so long if strict spam thresholds were in place.

And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to. I have correctly configured sfp, dmarc, dkim, reverse dns for the Mailserver and have tested the wording with multiple mail testing services to make sure it doesn't have keywords that get automatically flagged.

And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain"

There is no form, no human to talk to and they just block you.

Angry parents come to me or course because they never redeived the activation link so I had to put up a disclaimer stating that if they should not use a yahoo email address if they have a different one

That would get you added to a "never block mail from this domain" whitelist that had higher precedence than everything else.

Scandalous, it's almost as if the established major providers have a financial interest in making it difficult for smaller providers and individuals to send mail using their own domains!

During the pandemic we had a lot of problems with the confirmation email for our 5000 T.A. in the virtual campus of the university. I had to guess what was happening because I was not part of the administration team, just collecting forwarded messages form the T.A and guessing:

* Gmail: Most of the time it works.

* Yahoo: The server receives a few hundred emails per day and the other are delayed. These were confirmation emails with half an hour tolerance, if they were lucky to pass the next day they were not useful. (After a week the sending server stops retrying.)

* Hotmail: Sometimes the email is received and sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate. (Try sending an email from hotmail to the no-reply address and cross your fingers.)

* Others: No enough data to have a good guess.

Gmail will do this too. Happened a few months ago with a single (important) message from a private individual sender on Hotmail, one unknown to my Google account. The fix was adding the Hotmail address to a Google Contact.

Am I crazy or just missing some super obvious gap with this path?

You'd also have to do a lot of work to validate new senders long before they send their first message and you start getting complaints or else you're just letting spammers pay you to completely bypass every mail provider's spam filters until they finally get blocked and have to create a new account with you under a different company name.

If you can convince everyone to trust you, and your service, and that it'd be worth it for mail providers to do all that work on their end on top of everything they're doing currently to prevent spam, it really could improve deliverability.

Why would you need to do that? Just work with those that'll pay you for it. The others won't care as they'll just ignore the header.

I suppose that really you'd be able to get a lot of utility by convincing just a handful of very popular email providers (gmail) to trust that your service will never be used to send spam (or that they should let spammers who slip by you right past all of their spam filters). The more email providers you can get to use your service though the more you could charge the mass mailers for guaranteed message delivery.

Such a service could lead to two very bad outcomes though. Parents being told that if they want to get email from the school they'd better sign up for an email account at one of the few supported email providers (gmail) and/or (if it becomes successful) any sender who isn't paying for the privilege of sending email being treated like a spammer.

This is often not a non-sense complaint. A lot of newsletter signups are still via pre-selected checkboxes that are easy to miss.

There would be other ways to clog the system using trashmail providers but thankfully no student cared enough for that yet

Unsubscribing from an email just unsubscribes from that one list. They don't show any other lists or categories (or imply there are more) during this process.

Once you login you are greeted with a multi-page disaster to manually untoggle each of the near 100 list types.

Then when they add new notifications it is auto-on for everyone.

I started doing this years ago after watching a talk by some Gmail devs on how they think of spam. They said they internally - controversially - redefined spam to be any email the user doesn’t want to receive. Well guess what? I don’t want to receive shitty marketing emails after I unsubscribe. If you send them to me, I’ll get you listed as a spammer.

I encourage everyone else to do the same thing. Life is too short to put up with this crap.

The special award though, must go to Wal-mart. That company doesn't exist in my country. I obviously never interacted with them in any way. I still get their "newsletter", and sure enough, it's authenticated to come from their domain.

So if anyone has ideas for connecting with your local community, I’m still looking…

Which are usually just black people existing or generic "people walking by my house" reports.

At least it’s on brand. Once you start reading you will be so in awe of the insane and sociopathic people who do the bulk of the posting.

A decade ago I went to my country's embassy to renew my passport, and they now use my email to subscribe me to the newsletters of any new political party. All unsubscribe links just 404s. Shameful behaviour.

Anything I receive from any of their political candidates goes straight to spam now. The hope is that I am training the spam filter so it marks those as spam for all other users as well.

It's simple really: have clearly visible, working unsubscribe link in the body of the email that doesn't require jumping through hoops, and be from a company I know and use. Otherwise the spam filter learns about it.

You can probably guess how effective that is. In practice, unless you can get the FTC or a state attorney general to sue an actual company for you, nothing will ever come of it.

[0] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/

Lot of people, especially of the older generation, forward all sorts of emails to their friends and family every day. If one person who received a forwarded email doesn't like it and clicks the unsubscribe link, the original recipient (who clearly likes the email enough to forward it around) gets unsubscribed. That's a bug. If you don't like the unfunny newsletter your uncle keeps forwarding you, that's a problem between you and your uncle, not between your uncle and his newsletter!

The email submission form exists to ensure that the person unsubscribing is the person who is actually on the mailing list. It will not prevent an annoyed nephew from deliberately unsubscribing the original recipient, but it will prevent most cases of mistake by third parties.

Similarly, many unsubscribe links require two clicks instead of one, because some email services used to automatically check out every link they found in the body of an email. A one-click link would unsubscribe everyone before they even saw the email. Nowadays we have better protocols and better email scanners, but old industry habits die hard.

Email providers autoclicking on links, is the recipient's problem. This is the same flow used for account verification links and yet you do not see them adding an additional step to it.

And then we have the large number of users complaining about this, and yet they feel they simply know better and reserve the right to impose themselves on us?

This decision is purely self serving, let's not pretend otherwise.

Some people have come up with a trick to hide the unsubscribe link with CSS when it is inside a <blockquote> tag, as in a forwarded email. It doesn't work reliably, though. HTML email is still stuck in the 90s, it's impossible to do anything fancy inside of it. Much easier to send the user to a real web page for an actual transaction.

That comment explains that there's a scenario where people can be accidentally unsubscribed in the presence of mail forwarding, and the requirement to enter an email address can patch over this.

Thankfully I don't have people forwarding emails to me outside of work...

The page can prompt the email address, and have a simple unsubscribe button. Not perfect, but okay.

Even better, one-click unsubscribe features (e.g. Gmail's App) are presumably set up to work for the current recipient (not the original sender) so the problem is resolved for anyone using an email client with inbuilt unsubscribe.

The forwarding problem is only for html link unsubscribe. Personally I hate trying to play find-the-ubsubscribe-link, so I use the email client feature where possible (which also helps Gmail rate/flag spam).

Mostly I haven't had problems with repeat spammers, except a republican politician (I'm not in the USA so doubly annoying).

I understand the parent's sentiment because we all want to unsubscribe from unwanted emails. But technical standards can't distinguish unwanted emails from business-critical emails. You could legitimately cause someone damages by silently unsubscribing them from an important news feed. (Imagine that you silently unsubscribed an open-source maintainer from all github notifications!) Even worse, this kind of vulnerability disproportionately affects senders who try to follow the rules and make it easier for people to unsubscribe. Spammers don't care and keep spammin'.

Ideally, an email would have both a one-click List-Unsubscribe header and an HTML unsubscribe link in the body. The latter need not be one-click, and in fact, if it's anything remotely important, should not be.

Do open-source maintainers forward around their unsubscribe links in practice?

The other problem with email scanners clicking links automatically can be solved without prompting for the email address. One simple solution is: if the link is clicked within a minute or so after sending the email there's a chance the clicker is an automated system. Instead of unsubscribing right away, serve a HTTP POST form with a single "Confirm Unsubscribe" button. Normal users will rarely see the form, automated systems will hesitate to fire off HTTP POST requests.

It absolutely should be one-click.

I’m a republican (also not in the US sense — I want to get rid of the tie to the monarchy) but I also find that republican politicians seem to be really annoying!

Never interact with spam. Unsubscribing just tells spammers that your email address is actively being checked, and that you're the kind of person who clicks on links found in unsolicited messages. It can even end up getting you more spam (as you've noticed), and what looks like an innocent unsubscribe link can actually take you to a malicious website instead. You've really got nothing to gain by touching spam at all.

The best way to deal with the spam that makes it into your inbox, especially spam that comes from specific senders with predictable subject lines/body content like newsletters, is filtering. For example, just auto-delete anything from a domain you never want to hear from again. You never see it, and you leave them spending at least a little time/effort shouting uselessly into the void.

I tend not to auto-delete directly, but have things filtered into specific folders just in case. It takes almost no time to clear out when they get very full. Most filters are set once and forget.

This only applies to scam emails like newsletters from sketchy domains that you never signed up for, which are sent out specifically to find active email addresses. For those, clicking the "unsubscribe" link is indeed counterproductive.

For actual businesses like Linkedin though, it makes more sense than not to unsubscribe from unwanted emails anytime they're sent. On occasion you'll find yourself back on a different newsletter list, but it's relatively rare and more often than not just incompetence rather than malice; legitimate companies want to send their emails out to people who buy stuff, not people who mark them as spam and lower their reputation.

Yet there are people here on HN telling us that we have some kind of responsibility to watch ads, not block them, and support the kind of people who do this slimy, evil, unethical bullshit.

They already have my e-mail address, likely even verified. They're also somewhat normal companies, i.e. they have an address where the local DPA can send a friendly reminder, and while they will happily pass your (likely hashed) e-mail address to Facebook for ad targeting, actual selling to spammers is incredibly rare.

I often can't just filter the domain because I might actually need to deal with the company again (if I boycotted everyone who acts like a dick I'd be living in a cave).

Also, for many, unsubscribe actually works.

The threshold is "spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%".

That sounds pretty low to me, but I'm not in the bulk email business. I guess maybe a very small number of users actually report spam? Or maybe Google is being strict.

Source: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequir...

(I work for Google, but on something totally unrelated, and don't speak for them or have any inside knowledge.)

I think this is, generally, the correct approach. There isn't really a salient reason to discriminate between "email I don't want from someone I don't know" ("true spam", if you will), and "email I don't want from someone I do know" (aggressive newsletter campaigns et al). Spam is the button to send a signal that you got an email you didn't want.

> My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages.

This is the system working as intended to me, as the customer of the email service. I like that my email provider is throwing their weight around to put the fear of God into bulk senders and forcing them to think about how this campaign will impact their sendability. I would much rather annoy the hell out of bulk senders than cede emails to spammers like we have with phones.

In most other cases (e.g. newsletters sent based on a tiny pre-checked checkbox or without asking for consent), the spam button is of course the right tool.

Sounds like it's working as intended.

I hope they not. Gmail spam filter is far from being perfect and classifies many non spam messages/senders as spam. May be because they heavily rely on user reports (to train AI?) and email users tend to report all kind of emails as spam including clearly ham messages like bank statements, appointment notifications, password reset emails e.t.c.

For more shady stuff I have some throwaway mail at some free mail provider.

these are spammers, not cases where you ever actually signed up to some kind of legitimate newsletter or discussion group. to pretend good faith is your first mistake...

There is definitely a punitive cost for sending emails that are repeatedly marked as spam though. You also can’t just cycle IPs because a brand new IP with zero sender reputation is treated with almost as much suspicion by the big player as one that is known to be a spammer.

It’s much better to give people an option to opt out, and to honour it. Most of the email sending providers (e.g., SendGrid, mailchimp, etc) force you to include the link and automatically block future sending to that address. Some will even provide you the option to provide a reason, where you can specify “I did not sign up for this” which in sufficient number will flag the sender account. I suspect the vast majority of cases where people unsubscribe but continue to get email is actually some incompetence from not having multiple disparate email systems sync back to a shared do not contact list (rather each system is maintaining its own).

Click the unsubscribe button.

The dialogue goes something like this:

robert: you know I'm retired from hero work.

Edna:As am I, Robert, yet here we are.

so now it's 2023. you're telling me it's now safe to click on unsubscribe to the spam emails.

yet here we are.

no, the strait forward response is to ignore and mark as spam any unsolicited emails you did not explicitly sign up for. don't try to interact through the desired or expected channels of any entity that spams you.

Your reasons are not actually rational.

i appreciate its impossible to prove a negative (everyone could be doing something they have no evidence or documentation of doing), but given my mail provider both says that you have to mark a selection before they'll share such information with partners and that marking emails as spam still trains your own user specific spam filter, i don't think (and an really hoping) this is not a universal thing.

I worked on an email system that sent billions of emails a month. We used these messages from providers to ensure we never sent them an email again to prevent hurting our reputation. (Marking an email as spam, is by itself, a very low signal on reputation, unless some massive % of recipients mark it as spam. Sending an email to someone who has already indicated you are sending them spam is a high signal that you’re sending spam, however).

It doesn’t even matter when you do it. We had people (outliers) who would go back and hit every single email we sent them for the last 6 years as spam, after a bad customer service interaction, not getting a refund, or whatever pissed them off. We actually investigated all outliers. Most people didn’t report spam on anything older than 6 months.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)

Further, pixels can be embedded in the email so they can see when you open the email and how many times.

The sender has every incentive to properly handle unsubscribe to avoid spam traps. If you get big enough, users WILL come sign up for your service with a known spam trap email. If your operations are as sloppy as you’re suggesting, your email sending capabilities go poof.

I think this risk is overstated. Individual spam recipients in the United States have no standing to sue under CAN-SPAM; only the FTC does, and there's a high bar to get their attention.

my university spams me. i bought a torch from olight. they spam me. i get food deliveries. they spam me. i bought some tech. they spam me. i look for real estate they spam me. i get a delivery. they spam me.

it's differentiating between the two that's unrealistic.

Some large companies even flagrantly violate the extremely lax rules that exist in the States. Guitar Center has infamously been sending me emails that are in direct violation of the one click unsubscribe regulations for almost a decade now. I can’t even sign in to the account to cancel the emails (which is in direct violation of the regulation- it is ambiguous on a lot of things but the one thing that it isn’t is that you aren’t supposed to be required to log in to opt out of email communications) because it was made with my dad’s email from 20 years ago yet I’m the recipient of the spam.

I did report them; but of course nothing must have happened because they are still doing it.

The LinkedIn way.

And then there's those online stores that cover the entire page in a popup that you can get a 20% discount code if you give your email. Technically I've opted into their marketing. But I always just use the coupon and then report the email as spam without bothering to unsubscribe.

Also there are separate email marketing laws.

Referring friends and family by sending emails on your own? Who the fuck does that since ~2010? Ever heard of social media and instant messengers?

Edit: Parent was a wall of text when I responded. Stealth editing it to something completely different is not cool.

(An attacker used the paypal guest account feature and used my IBAN [european bank account number] and tried to hide the mail within those hundreds of mails. They were successful for some days, until the purchase showed up on my bank account)

A few times I've had unsubscribe links absent or not working for whatever reason and done that and a human's replied and sorted it out.

At MailPace we already enforce DKIM, it’s pretty basic stuff. But list-unsubscribe is optional for our senders.

We can make this a requirement and manage lists for senders who don’t / can’t implement a webhook to handle it (we already default to blocking resends to emails that hard bounce).

However I am curious how Google will track this. Just because the header is set, it doesn’t mean it’ll do anything. In fact it can be used by spammers to identify legit email addresses and spam them separately.

True, but I think when you're processing the volume of email that Gmail is, you'll have enough data to be able to infer whether the unsubscription was processed.

Reason I'm asking is Unsubscribe rarely works for me due to my catch-all not SENDING emails from the address it was received on. It sends it from my actual address. Very annoying.

If we build this as a mandatory feature at MailPace, we'll use an HTTPS webhook with a unique identifier for the email, so if you unsubscribe from a list sent via us, it will work for you.

But they can track proxy metrics for this. For example people using GMail's builtin unsubscribe feature more than once with the same unsubscribe link for different emails is a pretty good indicator the unsubscribe did not work.

However if email blocking becomes too aggressive then it can easily result in mails containing information that senders are literally required by law to provide to the recipient being silently dropped, which essentially means the mail service has caused the sender to unknowingly break the law. The penalties for not providing required information under consumer protection rules can be extremely serious in jurisdictions like the EU.

And Joe Random can be a real customer who you are really required to provide with information but can still hit the "this is spam" button if they don't particularly care or want to see it so reading too much into self-reported spam flags is a bit of a slippery slope. Combine that with mandating one-click unsubscribe but possibly without recognising types of emails that again the subscriber literally can't legally not send (at least not without sending the same information to the same recipient some other way instead) and there could be some real danger here.

Also it requires senders to actually implement it, which is not possible to confirm. Although we could add a catch all service that does this automatically, which I think we'll do.

Are you asking to be blacklisted from all future transactional email from a particular service? That’s something very different to being unsubscribed. You’re asking to be added to a list, permanently.

As I was writing this message, Florida Power and Light sent me yet another "transactional" message I can't unsubscribe from because they're under the mistaken impression I'm their customer.

A couple examples of such nuancing qualifiers:

- "unless prior permission has been obtained or unless there is a pre-existing commercial relationship between the parties" (UK)

- "for the purposes of direct marketing" (EU)

You may read this table to get more examples of local definitions and the associated regulations, per country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam_legislation_by_co...

I'm not excluding transactional emails because to someone who doesn't want your email ... it is not transactional.

You are making a bunch of leaps of logic:

1. The person you are emailing is the same person using your service.

2. The person you are emailing consents to you emailing them about your service.

Consent can be withdrawn at any time, it doesn't matter if it is "transactional" or not, "legally spam" or not. This is just basic human decency and if you cannot follow it ... then this is why we need laws, I guess.

That's my concern as well. Ah well, we'll just mark them as arc=pass and sit back and relax.

I contacted the customer support for all of them and they said they can't do anything about it. To change the customer's e-mail address, I need to prove I'm the customer, and obviously I have no idea who they are.

So I gave up and implemented a Gmail filter in the end, but I definitely wish that parallel with the traditional unsubscribe, there was a way to say "this isn't that person's e-mail". Where I don't have to prove I'm the person, I just have to demonstrate I receive the e-mails.

I have in the past had very good data on how often a russian guy got a haircut.

I'm not sending these.

I've also done this where I've donated $25 to U of California in the name of my friend who went to Stanford (rival universities). He's likely still getting calls.

> whenever I don't feel like putting my own email or phone number I just put his

This sounds more like malice than well thought out humor. If I found out someone I knew and respected was using my primary contact information for spam emails at <insert random pet supply store or random restaurants' rewards programs here> I would definitely consider not talking to that person much any more. The rival university one however I would let slide because the intent from you is obviously different.

Have you tried doing this recently? Creating an email address has become a fairly draconian process.

I'm not sure, are you implying that it is not worth doing this, and you would rather instead just pollute the inboxes of people that happen to know you? If so, would you like to be friends? I'd be happy to receive your junk emails if in exchange I can come by your place and just leave my trash in your front yard/driveway.

If you want an account for random garbage that demands an email address, use mailinator.

Hostile? A bit, but after contacting services and complaining, nothing would get done anyway.

I ended up changing email providers because of that.

A big part of why I’m stuck on/with gmail is that filtering redirects about 90% of those to spam.

That doesn't really make sense? If you used an address on your own domain, other people would be pretty unlikely to enter that email address instead of their own. The problem with misaddressed email should be limited to domains with really high username density; nobody else than the Gmails and Outlooks of the world need to solve the problem because nobody else also has the problem.

For example, email clients generally allow you to use multiple accounts at the same time. Configure your client to read emails from both accounts at the same time, and any time an important email arrives at the legacy account try to update the sender.

(I mean, I'm sure that xkcd.com/1172 applies, but still this seems like an odd thing to be blocked by.)

I'd rather begrudgingly keep taking advantage of Google's spam filter over adopting the added workflow branch that is perceivably likely to trail me for another decade-plus.

My name is common in certain areas, and I consistently get transactional email from banks, telecoms, and insurance companies around the world.

These businesses do not verify that their customer’s email is truly their own prior to sending emails.

Framing custom domains as the solution to this problem is a bit rash, no?

On one of my SaaS apps workers receive details on their shifts via email. If I allow them to one-click unsubscribe, I know there will be many who do so accidentally, with no idea how to resubscribe.

Currently they need to sign in and manage their contact methods in settings (email, SMS, etc). Thus they know how to re-enable it if they disable it.

I can see many support requests from managers saying "X worker isn't getting emails". Sigh.

“Hey. You unsubscribed. Here’s a link to resubscribe if you happen to want to!”

Right after someone unsubs.

It’s already pretty standard practice to send an email notifying that the unsub request was processed.

Perhaps you could notify the manager when a user unsubscribes? Puts the ball in their court to notify the user (their employee) they aren’t going to get critical emails. Make sure any unsubscribes show up in a log available to your customer.

- confirmation of my order

- my order has been despatched

- my order is out for delivery

- my order has been delivered to locker

- reminder to collect from locker

- my order has been collected from locker

- feedback on customer support chat experience

- my return label has been generated

- reminder to return my item

- my refund is processing

That's Amazon, in case it's not obvious. I don't need any of that by email, I immediately archive it, and if I want to know I look in my account, not my email. I even have the app installed and notifying me with all of the same and more (I'm spared 'x stops away' by email).

The vast majority of Amazon customers do not have its app installed. And those who do have the app can disable Amazon emails or create filters in their own mailbox, it's not exactly difficult.

No you can't, that is the point that is being discussed.

Oddly, on the cash app thing, I have a very basic username and seem to constantly have folks sending me money, sometimes good amounts. I never use the app, and eventually I hope the money goes back if I don't collect it.

More annoying on email but much less than it used to be - I think more systems require email verification now so a bit less common to get the misdirected order emails etc.

But yes, if I can't unsubscribe - then I block and report spam - even if it looks like transactional email (some is a lead-in to a scam where they will refund you for the "bogus" purchase).

Think of it the same way Canada’s anti spam law (CASL) works. https://emailkarma.net/2016/09/qa-transactional-emails-unsub...

Anyway, the job applications have died down, but I still get plenty of others for people who are creating accounts. I unsubscribe when I can, and "mark spam" when I can't.

Edit: I suppose it does say "unsubscribe from commercial email in one click". But it's hard to say exactly what they mean. They also don't define Bulk Senders - is that the domain or the sending SMTP server?

At this point something as simple as ordering something online means I get 4-7 emails and then some growling "please rate us" shit. And if I am stupid enough to do so, but only rate it 4 our of 5, another "we are sorry, please tell us what we did wrong" email.

I very aggressively unsubscribe from everything so I get very little mailing list spam. Maybe a few messages a month.

What I do get _constantly_ is spam email messages to my inbox from Gmail and Outlook domains. At least one a day for many years. Because it from Gmail, they have very little spam filtering done, yet if any other provider sent these messages then Google would block the entire domain.

These particular spam messages get on my nerves, and these are the only ones making it through to me.

Never unsubscribe from anything you haven't subscribed for (or at least where you haven't gave your email address to the sending party), because I believe any interaction with unsolicited emails provide spammers with a clear signal that their spam is not just delivered but also read and interacted with, so they get more agressive.

But more importantly even if I provide some signal that my email is active it's not going to change that much. They can send more, but that just helps train filters.

Lastly default Gmail settings loads remote images. Just opening the email is enough to create some signal. Having remote images turned off is enough to stop most engagement pings.

Whereas quite a few of these quasi-spam marketing emails from a company that I once had some interaction with. The worst is hotels - you stay at 10 hotels during the course of a trip, then you get added to 10 email lists for the rest of your life.

I doubt Google would do that to other big companies.

Some accept user-provided email addresses at face value, without any confirmation, and then refuse to stop spamming you.

Would Google block Paypal?

That’s what I have done on my outlook.

BUT, Why does IP reputation matter so much these days when you have DKIM, MTA-STS, DANE and other mechanisms that provide verification of the sender?

Say I want to startup a Email Service Provider, I need to go and source a bunch of IPv4 typically to have a premium upsell for end users to really ensure cross sender reputation does not impact other tenants. Crazy.

IPv6 historically at least was anecdotally punished by the likes of GMAIL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Office365 etc. Does anyone know if IPv6 hosted email severs still suffer additional spam scoring?

Gmail is the only inbox provider that doesn’t offer a real feedback loop (you don’t actually know if a given email address marked you as spam when sending to gmail users). The FBL in Google postmaster tools is anonymized and unreliable at best.

So essentially, you never know if a Gmail user marked you as spam so you can stop sending to them. Gmail will just by default mark your emails as spam for that user going forward, without telling you. This means your spam complaint level will inevitably rise over time without you knowing why and what email addresses are causing the issue.

Unless Gmail actually starts providing a real FBL like other inbox providers, the hard spam limit is going to snowball into a nightmare for even the most conservative and legitimate senders.

Think about this from the perspective of an actual spammer. You get a notification that address XYZ is marked as spam by user ABC. Well, now you just email user ABC from a different address.

The real problem is, for legitimate senders, the people who send less emails actually get higher levels of spam complaints! This is because humans are human and they forget who you are. I would argue this actually incentivizes sending more emails. This is why marketers all recommend sending garbage emails daily/weekly/monthly.

The truth is, the companies with full-time spam (marketing) departments will do just fine with these changes. It's the little guy who is going to have to navigate these complexities (likely unsuccessfully), and get shut out from yet another technology that used to be open.

On top of that, Google has started to offer perks for senders within Gmail for a $1,500 per year fee (VMC). They're basically one step away from collecting rents on all of email by way of their monopoly.

I also don't think it's complicated for the "little guys". The solution to avoid getting banned is simply to not send mass spam. It's not rocket science, don't mass email people knowing that they get mad at you when see your emails in their inbox.

hxxp://example.com/unsubscribe?id=abcd1234

A couple years ago I noticed that MSFT IPs hitting my unsubscribe links with invalid identifiers on the quest string. Anybody ever seen that?

This allows everything to be "one click" (which honestly is a good thing) but prevents crawlers from accidentally triggering the unsubscribe.

Not sure this still works today and obviously this is not legal advice.

You can use captcha or similar, one workaround I've seen has a submit that is hidden so never clicked by real people then a visible submit that sets a hidden input and clicks the other one which requires the hidden input... not foolproof but avoids some accidents.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/security-compliance-a...

Please report back if you try it :-)

If I get another email from that org, I click "report spam".

I've seen this pattern of unsubscribe link, then click button approved as CAN-SPAM compliant more than once so I don't think there's a legal concern. The CAN-SPAM rule seems more targeted at the systems you used to see a lot that required the user to log into their account, type in their email address, or figure out a complicated "communications preferences" list to use the unsubscribe form.

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

It's a little fuzzy to me how exactly to interpret this but I think you could reasonably read it as allowing even unsubscribe pages that require you to type your email address in again (even though I detest these and don't think the problem they're intended to solve is a meaningful one).

These are fine for me if the email is prepopulated.

I don't read clicking a "confirm" button as a second action. The attorney didn't either. He also said CAN SPAN doesn't apply to a 501(c)3. I still try to comply to be a good citizen.

What you can't do is take them to a page that says "to unsubscribe, send a certified letter to our headquarters and wait 90 business days". The entire transaction must be completed at the page you link to.

Bonus points when contacting support requires me to log in to "my account" too.

Details: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequir...

(I work for Google, but on something totally unrelated, and don't speak for them or have any inside knowledge. I was just curious and looked it up.)

That was my understanding at least.