[thesorrow]

Email is flawed and will become a one way protocol to receive spam, newsletters and invoices just like paper mail. I think Matrix is our second chance to build a secure federated communication suite. So far it's going in the right direction...

[rumanator]

> Email is flawed and will become a one way protocol to receive spam, newsletters and invoices just like paper mail.

I don't recall the last time I've received spam in my email inbox among the tens of emails I've receive daily, and newsletters/invoices are messages that users intend to subscribe. You might argue that instant messaging scratches an itch that email doesn't, but that's a bit shortsighted and doesn't make a case on why email is flawed.

[codezero]

Agreed. Fifteen year ago I set up an email system that let me give everyone a different email, depending on what service it was/when, and since then I've only had my email clearly sold off to a third party that spammed me once. It was a startup that got bought by a private equity firm (and is still around) and fwiw, after I unsubscribed from the first spam I got, it stopped...

[Nextgrid]

Newsletters and other BS notifications are the new spam.

Sure, you can technically opt-out and keep your inbox clean by spending 5 minutes opting out of the garbage every time you sign up to a new service, but that’s irrelevant considering nobody does this and most of my friends’ mailboxes are pretty much unusable because this kind of spam arrives every minute and they have tens of thousands of unread emails in their inbox.

However, in this case I’m not sure Matrix or any other service would be the solution. If the service is neutral and doesn’t impose policies on the content then scum like marketers will just move to it. On the other hand actually having “acceptable use policies” would require centralisation and bring its own problems to the table.

The real solution here is regulation, not technology.

[samdixon]

Most sites will allow you to opt out from account creation and also will allow you to unsubscribe without even having to login to your account. If your mailbox has 10k+ spam messages it is IMO a personal problem of either not opting out, or signing up for total garbage sites in the first place.

[Nextgrid]

Most subscription options at signup are using dark patterns to make you subscribe against your will (“untick this box if you want to miss out on the inconvenience of not receiving our latest deal”).

There’s also the issue of it being implemented badly (mostly by mistake rather than on purpose) where there are several spam systems & lists, the website opts you out of one but there’s another one in the background you can’t opt out of without at least receiving one and clicking the unsubscribe link - sometimes they make multiple campaigns so opting out of one doesn’t mean you’re safe from the next one, etc.

And finally there are those who aren’t technically marketing but a huge lack of respect for the person’s time & attention - customer service reviews and the “how did we do?” emails. Why can’t you put the feedback buttons in the existing emails instead of sending a new one and interrupting my flow & wasting my time?

For the latter I had a company doing this every single f’ing time for every ticket I opened about a benign bug or suggestion (using in-app chat still opens a ticket thanks to Zendesk Chat). I’ve eventually started forwarding them straight back into the main support email. I think they got the hint after several months - I’ve removed the forwarding rule and the feedback crap is nowhere to be seen. VICTORY!

Even if there are not technically marketing a lot of companies just have a complete lack of respect for their users time. Let’s take Facebook, Twitter or even Spotify for example; they have like over 20 categories of email notifications (excluding the newsletter) which are guaranteed to fill up your inbox by themselves, let alone having signed up to multiple of those services. You shouldn’t have to be manually unticking 20+ checkboxes just to enjoy a clean inbox.

[saagarjha]

I’ve started marking those as spam and they’ve really stopped bothering me.

[upofadown]

If we didn't have email we would immediately have to invent something that did the same thing. The world needs non-real time text messaging way more than it needs real time text messaging. After all, we still have phones which work well real time. They don't work well at all for non-real time messaging. That is why we went to all that trouble to invent and use things like teletypes.