[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.

[CRConrad]

In a way you're perfectly correct: You're only wrong in the tiny detail that you think it's your narrowly legalistic definition that is the objective, commonly-accepted standard one. It isn't. (BTW, how did the fact that nobody else here accepts it not tip you off that it's not commonly-accepted?)

But, sure, say we go with your wishes and, as someone else suggested, call your spam something else than "spam" -- let's go with their suggestion and call it "trash email". Then the category -- or, now, categories -- of stuff that we want to get rid of from our inboxes become, in stead of just "spam", the more cumbersome "spam and trash email".

I'm sure you see the problem that immediately rears its ugly head: Language is lazy. "Spam and trash email" will in daily speech, inevitably, shortly become... "Spam". You may try to resist that, and as a longtime linguistic prescriptivist I extend you my sympathies... (But, psst, spoiler alert: This quixotic struggle is doomed to fail.)

But, anyway, you are of course perfectly free to keep campaigning for your cause. Only, in the name of all that is decent, be honest about it and call it for what it is: You're not defending spam, "only" trash.

Maybe after a while you'll realise why the rest of the world sees no difference in your distinction.

[teakettle42]

> let's save 'spam' for things that actually meet an objective, commonly-accepted standard used by most groups that actually try to stop it

Your definition is based on what’s legal under the “established business relationship” exemption in the CAN-SPAM act, not any “commonly-accepted objective standard” of what spam is.

[Karunamon]

Spam fighting existed long before a 2003 US law. RBLs came into being in 1997, Spamhaus in 1998. You'll note precisely none of these organizations (in any country) blacklisting Amazon, or any other company, because they send marketing emails to their existing customers.

[CRConrad]

> Spam fighting existed long before a 2003 US law.

So then it wasn't originally defined as per your preferred legal wording, now was it?

> RBLs came into being in 1997, Spamhaus in 1998.

And did they coin the expression, or was the concept itself around long before that...? (A: AFAIK, at least a decade earlier.)

> You'll note precisely none of these organizations (in any country) blacklisting Amazon, or any other company, because they send marketing emails to their existing customers.

Ah. So it's not actually the legal definition that is important, but the corporate one. OK, gotcha, that is of course so much better. (Blindingly obvious: /s)

[Edit: Added missing quote marker > ]

[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…