[Karunamon]

>almost all companies will spam your email address, even if you check the box asking them not to.

I find this very hard to believe. "Spam" has a specific definition; the most important bit of which is that it is unsolicited. Mails landing in your inbox that you'd rather not get, but which are not unsolicited (say, by you signing up for an account and confirming your address), are not spam by definition.

"Almost all companies" would find themselves unable to send email in short order if what they were delivering was spam.

Definitions are important. Let's not misuse them.

[SahAssar]

Most email I get from services is unsolicited. While I did sign up for the services I did not solicit every newsletter, marketing email, "notification" and so on.

For 98% percent of services I use I mainly want my email for one thing: a way to reset my password.

Often I need to unsubscribe from each of them individually and then navigate some sort of "notification preferences" interface. Even after that has been done a lot of them seem to default any new newsletter or preference to on instead of deriving the preference from the closest existing option.

[Karunamon]

Yes you did. When you open a relationship with a company (by signing up to use their services), they are allowed to market to you, send you newsletters, and so forth, until such time as you terminate that relationship.

It isn't spam because you don't want it. If you actually don't want it, then click 'unsubscribe' - and if they continue to bother you afterwards (which, FWIW, I've seen a reputable company do a grand total of once in years), then and only then, is it spam.

[kbelder]

Your definition of spam is different than most people's. Yours is closer to the legal definition in the can-spam act, and other laws/regulations. But popular usage of the word doesn't _have_ to conform to your narrower definition.

That conflicting definition is why the people receiving your email marketing get so mad at you. They would rather have not given you their email at all, but they have to, and they don't want emails from you, but they get them anyway. They don't click your link to unsubscribe because they don't think it would work, and probably just make things worse. So they mark your email as spam, send it to their junk folder, and the returns on your email continue declining, and eventually the mail services start blacklisting you.

[teakettle42]

> It isn't spam because you don't want it.

It isn’t not spam because you want to send it.

You’re departing substantially from both the historical and commonly understood, contemporary definition of spam.

[Karunamon]

I see little historical precedent or common understanding for the HN definition of 'email I'd rather not have in my inbox' equating to 'spam'.

[CRConrad]

> I see little historical precedent or common understanding for the HN definition of 'email I'd rather not have in my inbox' equating to 'spam'.

Man, oh, man, you're funny. Even more so as it is apparently unintentional and you're being totally serious.

To the rest of the world, i.e. everyone who isn't a spammer, 'email I'd rather not have in my inbox' is and has always been the exact definition of 'spam'.

HTH!

[pooper]

This is the subject line of an email in my inbox right now. Sure you could say the sender allows me to opt out but I shouldn't have to opt out. This isn't legally spam but I want to know what you would call this unsolicited, non-transactional commercial email.

» Your Prime Membership: {{first name}} {{last name}}, discover the latest in deals and entertainment included with Prime

[Karunamon]

>I want to know what you would call this unsolicited, non-transactional commercial email.

Commercial email, differentiated from spam in that you have a commercial relationship with Amazon that you initiated and agreed to (i.e. solicited), and as such, they are allowed to market to you until such time as you ask them to stop.

I can see my opinion on this matter isn't a common one on HN.

[nkrisc]

Any email I didn’t request or expect as part of a transaction (shipping update email) is spam as far as I’m concerned. I’m not concerned with any other definition other than my own. I will report every unsolicited marketing email as spam to my email provider. If the company that sent it wants to dispute that is between them and the provider. I don’t care what happens after I report and block the address. I don’t care if it takes “up to ten business days” to remove me from the marketing email list. That’s not my problem, I told you now I unsubscribed now and as far as I’m concerned any email I receive after that is spam.

I’m just a lowly user. Reporting it as spam is the only recourse I have.

Thanks to years of abuse of my email address by marketers I am all out of fucks to give.

[simpss]

It's actually very dependent on the country and jurisdiction.

Some EU countries require that you offer a simple and effective option to opt-out when gathering the contact details. Depending on the content, that can be a required to be an opt-in toggle.

It's not enough to offer users a way to unsubscribe once you've already started spamming them, there should be a way to not have the first spammy newsletter/newsletter group.

[Nextgrid]

I'm curious - I see on your profile that you're a DevOps engineer presumably using a lot of online services on a daily basis, so what approach do you use to deal with email that would justify your opinion here?

Do you just let it fill up your inbox and essentially make it unusable as it's saturated with marketing spam? Do you read every single incoming email (if so how do you find time and how do you justify spending that time for this instead of other, more productive/fulfilling endeavors)? Do you have some magical, bulletproof AI that can classify and hide these marketing emails with 100% accuracy? Do you outsource the management of your inbox to someone else and if so how do you justify paying for that?

[Karunamon]

>so what approach do you use to deal with email that would justify your opinion here?

When I get email I don't want from a company I have an account with, I scroll to the bottom and click 'unsubscribe'. I then don't get anymore of those kinds of emails.

What I absolutely do not do is throw a hissy fit and click 'report spam' (which not fucks up my own bayes classifiers and makes false positives more likely, but sends harmful false reports to antispam orgs).

Seems to work quite well. Certainly well enough that I can't comprehend the level of snark and vitriol received here.

[Nextgrid]

So you're accepting that for every company you sign up for you should expect at least one spam that requires time & attention to deal with (some may require login, etc)? Fair enough but I disagree that this is something we should all be accepting just for the benefit of a minority that happens to work in marketing.

> of those kinds of emails [emphasis mine]

Also keep in mind that scummy companies have caught on to that and now have dozens of different categories of marketing emails and unsubscribing merely unsubscribes you from one of them.

[Karunamon]

What I "accept" is that getting an email I'd rather not have gotten is not a day-ruining event worth rudely snarking at strangers on the internet for, and the level of entitled rage and piling on generated in response to a calmly stated ask (let's save 'spam' for things that actually meet an objective, commonly-accepted standard used by most groups that actually try to stop it) is ridiculous.

[cardiffspaceman]

I have had enough experience with unsubscribe on spam that I have to wonder what your figures are for "working well enough". They don't work enough for me. It is also a well-known assumption that using unsubscribe on a bit of spam only confirms that the sender has found a working address and those sell for more on the spammer's email address market.

I also don't understand why "marketers" want to put stuff in my email inbox or anything else I use to receive real communications that I just don't want.

[adhesive_wombat]

If people dislike receiving that email so much that they report it as spam, it's spam.

Maybe if enough scummy companies have to mess about getting de-blacklisted, they might reevaluate whether their emails serve their customers, themselves, or, more likely, neither the company nor the customer but rather someone in between who is using some artificial metric (maybe "clients reached", "tracking pixels delivered", whatever) to angle for a pay rise.

[StanislavPetrov]

Unsolicited email from people and businesses you don't know is spam - and deserved to be flagged as such.

[Aeolun]

If only all companies actually had an unsubscribe link in their emails…

[barnabee]

Nope. In the UK and EU (and probably other places!) you can’t send someone email marketing unless they explicitly opt in (i.e. no pre-ticked boxes either) [1].

Also, it is presicely spam because I don’t want it, whether you have a right or even obligation to send it or not.

[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

[majewsky]

Well, technically you can, because the government agencies doing the enforcement are systematically understaffed.

[AlexandrB]

As a user, I don't at all care about the technical/legal definition of spam. As with obscenity spam is a case of "I know it when I see it".

[teakettle42]

> Mails landing in your inbox that you'd rather not get, but which are not unsolicited (say, by you signing up for an account and confirming your address),

This itself is a redefinition of “spam” to exclude the types of spam businesses want to send.

There’s a two-part test I use to define “spam”, which I think is aligned with both the historic definition, and how most users perceive it:

1) An e-mail is a marketing e-mail if, on the balance, the e-mail primarily benefits the sender, not the recipient.

2) A marketing e-mail is spam if the user did not explicitly opt-in to receiving them.

[olliej]

Behold the dictionary definitions:

Merriam-webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spam)

"e-mail that is not wanted"

Oxford (via google https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=oxford+...)

"irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients."

Neither is your absurd definition.

And to be clear, entering a business agreement for a product or service you sell, is not me soliciting anything other than that product. Marketing emails, "product updates", etc are not the product or service I am paying for.

[dragonwriter]

> "Spam" has a specific definition;

The legal definition of spam arose as a distortion of the preexisting concept lobbied for by spammers to allow as much spam as politically possible while allowing politicians to be seen as “doing something” about the spam problem.