[itopaloglu83]

I don’t know if this is true with Font Awesome, but more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings.

So, I mark any unwanted email as spam in Gmail immediately, and even leave bad reviews.

Having my email address is not the same as having my consent. Stop trying to roofie us with malicious EULAs.

[Larrikin]

I remember there was a thread some years back with an article complaining that you get emails immediately on sign up, but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe.

One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. He will never fix it and doesn't care if you get some more spam after you unsubscribe since he has done the bare minimum.

If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.

[mathieuh]

My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.

[helsinkiandrew]

> but that it can take up to 10 days to stop receiving emails when you unsubscribe

This is a really bad business practice, people will just mark your mail as spam and the likelyhood of other people seeing your mails will drop

[Maxion]

I still do not understand how marketers haven't understood that quality > quantity.

[drob518]

But often $ generated by quantity > $ generated by quality. And that’s the metric everyone really cares about.

[Pay08]

Because a lot of the time, it isn't.

[bell-cot]

Inside the marketing org bubble, quantity is the "any moron could see that" metric. So anyone who wants to get ahead, inside that bubble, had better be willing to optimize it.

[dspillett]

They understand.

They also understand that they have little or no quality that most people actualy want and from their PoV quality > quantity > nothing.

[eru]

> One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal.

Hmm, wouldn't you want to remove the money losing people as soon as possible, so you don't waste even more money on them?

[jonhohle]

Doesn’t compute.

He probably meant that “customer” is not making him money, therefore not worth the time. The only reason unsubscribing works at all is probably a legal requirement.

[TeMPOraL]

It does, probabilistically. For any given customer C, the expected value EV(C) is... not much. By starting an opt-out process, a customer Co is revealed to have EV(Co) = 0, which is less than not much.

[eru]

Though it's making the other customers statistically more valuable.

[achandlerwhite]

It’s because transactional email and marketing email are two different systems.

[mrweasel]

That's not really relevant here. The complaint is that you start getting promotional emails right away, meaning that adding you to a mailing list is instant, but removing you somehow takes ten days. Normally you can't unsubscribe from transactional email, as they serve to provide you with information you're legally entitled to. There might be companies that are foolish enough to use the same system for both transactional and marketing email, but normally you'd never do that, because you exactly risk having things like order confirmation, recalls, invoices and so on, be tagged as spam, if it uses the same system as the marketing emails. Frequently you can use the same provider, allowing for tracking bounce rates, open indication and so on, but even if it's within the same interface or set of APIs, the two things are kept very separate on the backend. They'd at least use different email addresses, but frequently also different domains/sub-domains.

I've done both transactional and marketing emails, and I've never seen a system that could not remove a user at least within 24 hours. I can imagine one, but you're doing something very wrong at that point. Ten days is deliberate.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Sounds like an engineering problem that can be solved, and, more importantly, not my fucking problem.

[nkrisc]

As the end user: not my problem, I don’t care, I don’t need the implementation details.

I only care about what I see.

[atoav]

This is when I send them a GDPR data request followed by a deletion request. If they send me spam after, I sue them with the receipts.

[ferngodfather]

> If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.

Fuck me, that is brutal and could absolutely ruin your SES complaint rate - even with the suppression filter on, as the emails are already in your inbox.

[withinboredom]

When I worked on a notification system that sent over a billion messages a month. We received spam complaints on emails sent 6+ years ago. No correlation, just a one-off spam complaint. I always wondered why this was happening.

[inetknght]

Probably because people like me finally had some time to go through an inbox with 20,000 unread messages. Almost anything that's been unread was either (most likely spam) or (very rarely) just simply unimportant.

[bigfishrunning]

Good. Don't send spam. If you're sending spam, then you clearly don't care about your complaint rate.

[EGreg]

I have done the opposite We had a million people enter their email over the last decade We haven’t messaged a single one.

Now we plan to start sending out a newsletter. For many, they may have forgotten downloading the app, but they might still appreciate it. If not - they can u subscribe.

[gpvos]

Don't do that, it will be disastrous for you.

Instead, send them a politely worded one-time announcement with an invitation to subscribe. Clearly mention that if they don't, this is the last mail they'll get from you, and keep that promise by deleting their address. You'll still get some pushback, but I think most people would find that acceptable.

[mrweasel]

At least with your suggestions there's some chance that their newsletter won't instantly get flagged as spam.

I'd do what you suggest, but send the newsletter from an separate domain once subscriptions have been confirmed.

[EGreg]

That one-time announcement is called an email. And therefore that first announcement itself can be flagged as spam.

And naturally, unless they click a link in the first email, gmail should consider anything subsequent to be spam anyway. They have no idea whether consent happened somewhere else or not.

The unsubscribe links must work without even opening the email, according to gmail rules.

[mrweasel]

What I'd be concerned with is that if you have never sent anything to these users, they might have forgotten where and when they gave you their email address and simply mark your message as spam.

We've trained users to not use "unsubscribe" because some spammers once used that to verify addresses, or they may simply click "Spam" because they forgot who you are and think you got their address illegitimately. Gmail also doesn't make unsubscribe as visible as "Spam", making flagging the easier option. So now Gmail will see some percentage of users manually flagging you as a spammer, tainting your sender. This is why I'd switch the newsletter to a new domain or at least a new sender address. That does mean preparing that new sender, give it a bit of time to mature and send a few emails to Gmail accounts you control and ensure that they are not flagged as spam.

Probably also test with a list of Gmail account you control and check if you're tagged as spam and fix that, before doing the big push.

[zephen]

As a gmail user who may or may not have had to enter an email address to do something on the web, and who gets annoyed by spam, let me describe my decision points (anecdote is not the plural of data, of course, but here I am) when it comes to "unsubscribe" vs marking something "spam."

If your email reminds me (upfront!) how and when and why I specifically gave you (and not some other third party) my email address, and promises that you are advertising this newsletter one time, and it is opt-in, and you keep your promise, I am highly unlikely to mark it spam.

Now, this presupposes that it was really me who gave you my email address. I have a fairly generic email address because I got on gmail early. There are many variants of it, but sometimes people forget to add the trailing numbers or letters, so I get misdirected email all the time.

If the misdirected email is personal, I usually respond letting them know of the issue.

If the misdirected email shows a clear understanding that I might not have been the one who really signed up then I give them a pass.

If the misdirected email blithely assumes that I am the one who signed up, then I blithely assume that its senders are too fucking stupid to use the internet and it goes straight into the spam bucket. (And this is usually an easy call because they use the name of the person with the similar email address, which is not my name. My email address is [e-mail] and there are many different first names that start with the same initial.)

Any failure on any of those other points starts to increase the likelihood of it being marked spam, and...

> The unsubscribe links must work without even opening the email, according to gmail rules.

So here's where I'm a hard-ass and maybe even worse than google's rules.

If I see the RFC8058 unsubscribe link, it is too late. I only notice that link after I've decided to mark your email as "spam" and google asks if I'm sure, or if I merely want to unsubscribe.

Why did I decide to mark your email as spam? One possible reason is that I read through it, decided that the sender legitimately had my email address and was acting honorably, and then clicked the unsubscribe link embedded in the email.

When I do that, one of two things happens. Either I get some form of "thank you, you've been unsubscribed" or nothing happens because the sender assumes that I am OK with them executing javascript on my computer.

This is a privilege I jealously guard and only reluctantly offer to as few websites as possible.

Even if I previously gave you my email address, that did not come with an open invitation to use my computing resources for your own purposes.

[traceroute66]

> Instead, send them a politely worded one-time announcement with an invitation to subscribe.

NO. DO NOT DO THAT !

That is terrible advice and it is against the law.

Opt-in has to be done without inducement and of a person's own volition.

Sending a mail to someone saying "pretty please sign up" is not valid opt-in. It is spamming a bunch of people hoping they will opt-in. It does not matter if you got their mail another way (e.g. if they purchased a product, you can't then spam them trying to get them to opt-in for your mailing list).

One of the fundamental reasons the opt-in law exists is to stop people doing the shit you suggest and ensure that lists are correctly built in a clean manner.

[EGreg]

Under GDPR, can someone send an email to people who 1) downloaded our app, 2) voluntarily entered their email, viewing a message that says if they do that, we can send them a newsletter about how to be more efficient with the app, and 3) selected what kind of person they are, e.g. a teacher, marketer, etc.

But it's been 10 years. Can we send them a newsletter now with an unsubscribe link? Does GDPR have an expiration date on that stuff? Yes it was affirmatively opt-in.

[gpvos]

I'm no expert, but I think that in principle you'd legally be okay. But the 10 years makes it more difficult on a personal level; many, likely most people will have forgotten about you and the permission they gave. Hence my earlier advice.

[kolektiv]

> over the last decade

Be aware that under various regulations, you're potentially already at risk of accusation in terms of unwarranted data retention. If you haven't got a good reason to have kept those email addresses, something like the GDPR might not interpret that favourably. While the GDPR doesn't specify actual time limits, they are expected to be proportionate. Financial records are generally 7 years unless otherwise legally required, so for a decade, you would be saying that these email addresses are more critical/valid than that. That may be the case, I don't know your business, but be careful if you don't want some very awkward questions asked. Just the hassle of having to deal with complaints you might get (and various regulators would take notice of 1 million instances) is likely to be more than it's worth for most.

The suggestion downthread to send a very clear "we still have your address, would you like to opt in to this newsletter, otherwise we'll remove it" is not a bad one, but even then, some people will object to you still having it at all.

[EGreg]

People originally opted in and provided it expecting to get a newsletter on how to use the app. We never seemed to have the bandwidth to create a good enough one, so we never sent it. We kept improving the app until it became very good and still never sent the emails. But retained the addresses, so that one day we could tell people the app has improved, to give it a try, include animated GIFs of it in action and gradually educate them on ways to use it. For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.

Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in. If you plan to send a newsletter out.

Other than those voluntarily entered emails (which aren’t even linked to the user), we haven’t retained literally any information about our users, despite having millions of users download and use the app over a decade. Which is far beyond pretty much any social app I know. But almost no one actually cares.

[kolektiv]

> For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.

I really wasn't trying to chastize, honestly it was intended as a friendly dollop of advice as someone who's dealt with this kind of thing. But since you have replied, I would say:

> Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in.

Relevance is likely to be seen as contextual. Someone wishing to do something a full decade ago is not likely to be seen as sufficient evidence to justify contacting them now in case they still wish to. That's a big chunk of the point about time-limiting data retention - the data gets less relevant and more problematic over time. I get that you're not trying to colour outside the lines here, but from the perspective of your users, and anyone looking at their potential complaints from a regulatory perspective, the window in which they reasonably consented to contact has closed (and probably some time ago).

The regulations are there, ostensibly, to protect consumers. They will be interpreted in that light. I can almost guarantee that if you sent an email to your downloader base 10 years after they last heard from you, being ignored will be the best case, and the worst will be reports to local regulators.

[EGreg]

Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure?

I would be glad to respect it if there was.

As it is, laws do allow for things they didn’t explicitly prohibit, and especially good-faith things like welcoming people to try the free app again, which they themselves downloaded and asked to be exucated about, since it’s improved, and showing them how and why to use the improvements.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

So you’re retrospectively assuming consent? Gross.

[EGreg]

No, the consent was given, recorded, and never acted upon. It had no expiration date. Many of those people are still using the app today.

[AlexandrB]

Most consent doesn't work like this in people's minds (never mind what you "recorded"). I'd be furious and immediately flag as spam and review the app 1 star (if possible) for good measure.

[williamdclt]

> It had no expiration date

- non-legally speaking, consent for anything is never illimited in time. So whatever the law says, you're probably doing a dick move, I'm sure you can conceive that most people you're going to email would rather not get this email and you're planning to do it anyway. So if you act against these people's interest, don't be surprised if they react negatively (reporting the email as spam, complaining, reporting you to authorities)

- legally speaking... IANAL, but I don't think that you're correct that you have a legal basis to have kept this data, and even less to use it for marketing purposes. I don't think that you'd win the argument that the consent is still "informed" after many years of not hearing from you. If a reasonable person would no longer expect to hear from this company, then I don't think you still have consent under GDPR (could be wrong, IANAL)

[EGreg]

So basically — you are affirming the point of the OP whose article was shared.

Wait too long — respect people’s attention and time so much that you don’t send them anything unless it is ready and benefits them - and apparently it’s spam when you finally do contact them. Meanwhile, if you were just drip feeding them slop once a month, then you’re fine.

I happen to agree with the article author, the email ecosystem is totally broken, that’s far more of a problem than small teams who have well-meaning intentions and respect for their users’ time. You’re blaming the victim, rather than the email system that’s open to SPAM and dominated by gmail.

[htnthrow11220]

Complete assumption on your part.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

It was a question with an assumed answer which I think is pretty likely. It wasn’t presented as fact.

I think at this point it’s pretty reasonable to assume the worst of email marketers, and I don’t care if you think otherwise :)

[htnthrow11220]

Sure. I took it as I think you intended - a statement of your understanding. I guess I just was irritated in, the moment as people are constantly reacting to unverified assumptions when there are many real things to react to. Apologies if I added to the pile of annoying things on the internet for you!

[Macha]

My reaction would be to report spam with a vengeance

[bandrami]

Oh my God don't do that

[QuercusMax]

What percentage of those million still use your app?

What percentage of those million remember the existence of your app?

Unless you're sure both of those are VERY high, you would be an absolute imbecile to spam them.

[cube00]

>more and more companies are spamming my inbox despite disabling any promotional emails in their settings.

The other trick I've noticed is companies will add new categories and default those on. I'll see a whole page of categories and somehow the last one will be enabled even though I'm sure I'd have turned them all off when I disabled the bulk of them.

[random2021]

True.

Another worse offender is gitlab. They send promotions hidden as a part of this is obligatory account related into telling blah blah and adding BTW see these extra features for more payments.

[duskdozer]

Not just gitlab. I'm seeing this happen more and more. I'm assuming it relies on the fact that it's a nontrivial investment to file a government complaint.

[iamacyborg]

Or add junk to existing categories. Amazon are sending me a ton of notifications for their “Haul” shop but I have absolutely zero interest in the cheapest made shit. No way to turn off those notifications without disabling the entire category.

[bradleyankrom]

LinkedIn does this and it is annoying

[mk12]

I recently tried disabling notification in LinkedIn. The designers and engineers working there who created the notifications settings are truly evil. You have to go through 14 categories. Some of them let you toggle the whole category at once, some don't. Some categories are split into 8 more subcategories.

[Gigachad]

I just flag as spam in my email client and it takes care of all future emails.

[leni536]

Linkedin sends you notifications an emails for having other unread notifications without any additional info. It's really the worst.

[ferngodfather]

"Someone viewed your profile" with a blurred photo of them.

So you know exactly who it is, but you won't just tell me in the email? I have to open the app/site so you can tick your engagement box for the day?

So glad I'm off that shit hole. It's just full of pompous picks anyway.

[aidenn0]

To this day I do not have a LinkedIn account because they have historically been the most aggressive spammers of any company. The year I graduated college, almost 2/3 of the e-mails I received were LinkedIn spam.

[rvba]

"Terms of use" update emails seem to be a new way to remind you about a service too.

[wildzzz]

It's the same with app notifications. I get a new app and it asks to turn on notifications. I need to get timely updates on stuff happening in the app so I click yes. Suddenly every day my phone's notification drawer is just full of spam from that app that is not relevant to what I actually need the app for. For most legit apps, they'll break out the notifications settings so you can turn off the marketing stream but leave on the critical stream.

[itopaloglu83]

Apps like Rollo will complain on every launch that it cannot spam you with notifications if you don’t enable it.

Honda doesn’t let you find where your car is (which is a paid service) unless you share your precise location with them.

[TheLNL]

The Honda thing sounds more like a technical limitation for the feature to work than a way to get permission for malicious reasons.

[Pay08]

My fucking public transport app does that, it's incredibly irritating. And all the notifications I get are lotto ads.

[armadyl]

Stripe does this to me and it's starting to get annoying. They offer an unsubscribe option to remove you from current mailing lists but perpetually have you auto added to new mailing lists effectively making the unsubscribe option useless.

[godelski]

Intel did this to me with a job application... they just sent tons of promo shit even after I unsubscribed

And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites. It's for exactly this (and to see who's selling it). My only real recourse is to delete the email address. Thanks mozmail, and thanks bitwarden for integrating. But it's also dumb as shit that we have to do things like this.

[drnick1]

> And people wonder why I make unique email addresses for every site and even multiple for some sites.

This, right here, is the solution.

[godelski]

It's not a solution, it is a defense. A solution would not require the action in the first place. It is a shitty thing that we have to act this way and we shouldn't be complacent with our defenses. The solution is to make a world where we don't need to constantly defend.

[kstrauser]

I wrote about this recently: https://honeypot.net/2026/03/12/one-of-our-credit-card.html

We got political spam from one of our credit card issuers. It ended with this BS:

> ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account.

That outright lie had me ready to toss a brick through their front door. I haven’t been that righteously furious in ages.

[nathanaldensr]

I've noticed the same. Companies are disguising what are obviously marketing, advertising, or promotional content as "transactional." Experian is probably the most famous of these offenders. They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file (everyone's credit file changes every month almost by definition!) It's scummy, intentional, and IMO breaking the law.

[RHSeeger]

> They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file

And you can't even try to unsubscribe without creating an account. And, if I don't _have_ an account, it is (pretty much by definition) NOT transactional.

[staticshock]

I do the same. Gmail gives me a single, standardized interface for opting out of emails: mark it as spam. All the various companies I've given my email to, on the other hand, give me different, either clunky or often outright broken interfaces for opting out. There's no direct financial incentive for them to invest in making ethical, robust opt-out systems.

However well meaning, collectively all those companies are still just a bunch of sociopaths. This might be a bit dark, but I think a reasonable real world analogy here is stalkers and restraining orders. A stalker isn't motivated to listen to you when you tell them to stop talking to you. That's why you get the restraining order.

[echelon]

Are you an entrepreneur or an employee?

Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business and how shameless you have to be in the face of adversity to make it work?

It sucks. You have to do this stuff to get a customer relationship. The thing Apple and Google get for free and try so hard to snip you out of.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we regulated market monopolies and caused them to break up. More money to go around.

Font Awesome is a good business, but you know the gettings are tough when they have to do this.

A lot of y'all complain about this, then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under. We can't all be advertising behemoths like Google.

Google, which by the way, used monopoly power to take 92% of "URL bars" and turn them into proxy bidding wars for brands and trademarks they do not own. Totally illegal horse shit that passes costs onto consumers and makes it easier for big business to squash small brands (I've had big business spend ads on my tiny little trademark).

You're all angry at the wrong people.

[Barrin92]

>Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business

how is this my problem? Do you think wanting to be one of the cool entrepreneurs is a right or something? I don't care if the in your words shameless hustle goes under because you're spamming my mail with your fifteenth startup idea, that's my attention you're wasting, go get a real job.

I'll take trustworthy big business over shameless small business, I hope Google filters more of the stuff. I'm always astonished by people who try to justify their sketchy business practices with their underdog status. Those are by the way the exact same people who, once they succeed, do what they accuse Google of

[itopaloglu83]

I understand the sentiment and know how hard it is to advance in business especially within all the noise.

However, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be spammed and will even use the nuclear option and delete my account completely if spamming continues.

Your customers are not your minions, some would accept such communication and some would refuse. Tricking users into receiving emails will not work in the long term if your products suck.

[RHSeeger]

But that same exact logic applies to "it's really hard to succeed, so I'm going to just mug some people to get the money I need". I'm sorry, but "its hard to succeed, so I'm justified in being unethical" is _not_ a valid excuse.

[deaux]

I am an entrepeneur, not an employee. Never took VC money, boostrapped from very little. They're right though. Yes, Apple and Google need to be broken up. No, you absolutely don't need to be shameless and send spam emails to make it work. You don't need to spend money on Google Ads either.

[EA-3167]

Who’s angry? We’re just not interested in someone else’s unethical and unwelcome business practices and are acting to curtail its impact.

Your dreams of business success aren’t my problem, and neither is your shamelessness.

[echelon]

Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

That's a bit carried away, don't you think?

There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.

Meanwhile hyperscalers are constantly in your eyes and ears and they have a million ways to bypass those regulations and get into your headspace regardless.

Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.

Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.

Some have worked themselves into a place of eternal captive attention, everyone else is either climbing the mountain or running the treadmill.

And all those employees' livelihoods depend on it working. Otherwise they starve.

Be thankful you, as presumably an engineer, don't have to be exposed to this game. It's Darwinian and adversarial, zero sum, a fight to survive.

Maybe you're happy working for someone who does all this work for you or figured out a tiny niche where it isn't necessary. But reality is much different.

[Arainach]

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

I purchase a product from company X. They require an email and will not let me buy without it. I actually do want an email confirmation that the order went through and even that my product shipped.

I do not want emails about "we released a new thing" or "we have a sale" or "it's Tuesday and we want you to remember we exist". Signing me up without an explicit opt-in using information you required me to provide is absolutely unethical.

"X is even worse" does not make Y ethical, good, or acceptable. What your least favorite corporations do isn't relevant.

Other people are inconsiderate monsters who litter in national parks and abandon mattresses on the side of the road. BP and Exxon did more damage to the environment than I ever could. It's still unethical if I drop my garbage on the ground.

[hrimfaxi]

> Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.

I love your word choice here. "Securing" almost perfectly defines it, because you are acting with hostility against the person whose attention you are seeking to capture.

[nathanaldensr]

Exactly. Like most "growth hackers," they assume that our attention is their resource to consume, and we should all be grateful for the privilege of making them rich.

No thanks. I reject this as the abusive practice and mentality that it is.

[EA-3167]

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

The premise is that people are specifically opting OUT of those emails. Feel free to keep "hustling", feel free to treat people as resources to exploit, just don't be shocked and upset when those resources treat you like a parasite to be removed from their lives without concern for your financial wellbeing.

[wasabi991011]

> Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.

How do you define ads? Those are not ads in my book. An update is not an ad, I can't think of any valid interpretation of that other than "existence is an ad because people who interact with it might want to do do again" but at that point the word "ad" has lost all useful meaning.

[Arainach]

> An update is not an ad

To be fair, I think echelon was calling out that there are absolutely ads in browser updates now. "Try Firefox VPN!" "Look what's new in Chrome!", etc.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

In some countries it's not just "unethical", but outright illegal. Laws and rules vary, but all is equal to the spam button and the whims of those wielding it.

[duskdozer]

>Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

I never consent to advertising. If I receive an advertisement, that means it was forced on me. Which I consider unethical.

[RHSeeger]

> There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.

They don't. Period. Full Stop. There are tons of companies that I have told to stop sending me emails that just... continue to do so. And some that won't _allow_ me to tell them to stop (I need to create an account to tell them not to email me... but they shouldn't be emailing me if I don't have an account).

So no, they don't work.

[47282847]

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

Unless I asked for it, it is both unethical and will turn me as potential customer away, and it is illegal (GDPR).

[FireBeyond]

> Do you know how exceedingly hard it is to grow a business

This reminds me of a local bricks and mortar small business that closed down and the wife posted a completely tone deaf:

"It is a horrible shame that our long sought out dream had to die because the local "community" was not willing to support it."

I missed the part where "community" meant we are obligated to expend our own resources for your profit.

Doubly galling was the fact that there was generally "his n hers" G Wagons parked out front of their business. Doing better than 95% of the community and still pissed that the community wasn't giving them more.

[echelon]

Small business is brutal, isn't it?

You're fighting small biz and accept the world big tech has created to extort all of us.

You'd yell at that local brick and mortar for sending you a half off coupon in your email because it's spam, but my guess is you're fine with perpetual smartphone upgrades and not owning the entire vertical taxation and lock-in stack.

We're allowing ourselves to become serfs of big business that would no sooner outsource or lay us off.

The puzzling moral superiority is what really gets me.

Just don't complain when your tech company lays you off or your job has been automated out of existence. You might have to learn what hustle and sales really are.

[FireBeyond]

I have no problem with small business, but it seems like you have a chip on your shoulder and completely failed to miss the point. But, in case it wasn't clear - a husband and wife couple, who already appear to be more successful than the vast majority of the community they're in, actually going so far as to get pissed off at the community for not making them even richer. "The "community" (bonus points for the snarky air quotes) was UNWILLING to support OUR dream" they posted, from the front seat of their $200,000 SUVs.

Now, explain to me why I am somehow obligated to support their business?

[em-bee]

so the only way to grow a business is to sell to people who tolerate spam and avoid those who don't?

[echelon]

They complain a lot less.

This is why B2B is easier than B2C.

A consumer will pay $10/mo and ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. Get angry at an email.

A business will drop $10k no questions asked and your product can be garbage. As long as it solves or attempts to solve a pain point. Emails won't be seen as spam. Except by ICs/eng, perhaps.

[TeMPOraL]

> A consumer will pay $10/mo and

> ask for the moon. Threaten to leave.

That's normal business thing. What significantly helps reducing this, though, is the business is not promising the stars and engaging in all kinds of dark patterns with deals, cancellation friction, etc.

> Get angry at an email.

Particularly e-mail they did not ask for, and is not directly related to the thing they're paying $10/mo for.

[GroksBarnacles]

No company has ever gained users by forcing emails on users.

[echelon]

Every fashion brand on the planet reengages their customers this way and it works.

I learned about the Analogue 64 from a marketing email, and I bought it.

I see emails showing me new API features are available. Sometimes that's useful.

I see Font Awesome has new fonts. Useful.

I see a16z wrote an article that seems interesting to me. Useful.

I filter out the 95% of stuff I don't want. I'm not seeing ads for clothing, but my wife might and she might find that useful.

You're thinking that because you don't like it the practice should end entirely across the board?

You very rarely make it in this world without trying.

And if you don't like it, there's "unsubscribe".

Not everyone is lucky enough to be Apple. And even they send lots of marketing emails.

Engineers complain too much. The reality on the ground is much more steep and treacherous.

[Mordisquitos]

> Every fashion brand on the planet reengages their customers this way and it works.

I often receive emails from (among other things) fashion brands to which I never subscribed. There are clearly multiple people worldwide who, mistakenly or intentionally, are giving my `[e-mail]` at checkout or whatever rather than their own.

Every time I receive one of those emails I do two things:

1. Use their unsubscribe link on a private window, connecting with a VPN exit point in their country (or nearby). If asked, I select the "I never subscribed" or "This is spam" option.

2. Mark the email as spam on GMail, rejecting GMail's proposal to unsubscribe instead (as I already did).

I have no mercy and feel no guilt at reducing their email server's reputation. The only exceptions I make are the rare emails that ask me to confirm "my" subscription before sending "me" their stuff. That I respect, and I just ignore and delete.

[GroksBarnacles]

Reengaging customers is not gaining customers. I haven't been an engineer all my life, but I've been "on the ground" that entire time and I sure have gained a lot of disdain for a lot of companies because they won't stop emailing me.

[gpvos]

If a company sends me mail and I don't remember allowing them to, I will not trust them and will not use the unsubscribe button, because using it signals to the sender that my address is valid. I will mark as spam.

The onus for clearly communicating that you are going to mail me anything other than transaction updates is with the sender, not the receiver.

[AlexandrB]

A lot of y'all treat customers like shit - spam them, engage in dark patterns, constantly try to upsell, ask them to fill out surveys before they've completed a single purchase - then act surprised when businesses have to lay off or go under.

[M2Ys4U]

>You're all angry at the wrong people.

No. We're not. Perhaps we should be angry at both, but we definitely should be angry at you.

Spam is bad. If your business can't survive without sending spam, your business shouldn't survive.

[tsukikage]

Get this through your head: I. do. not. want. to. be. in. a. relationship. with. you. Using your product or service one time is not consent. Finding partners is hard, but that is no reason to propose marriage on the first date, and that strategy will not work well. No means no.

[nathanaldensr]

You're asking for others to take abuse on your behalf because your needs are more important than theirs. You're abusive. Stop coping and admit the truth. You're part of the problem but wrapping it in victimhood.