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by radio4fan 4436 days ago
To be fair, if the permission to receive mail is buried in TOS, then I'd consider it spam too. So I guess I attached my point to the wrong comment.

But I know from industry experience that some people who explicitly sign up to mailing lists then go on to report those emails as spam, and this dilutes the effectiveness of 'report as spam' features.
2 comments
nmcfarl 4436 days ago
I'm going to mention that at one point my company produced a custom product^, that cost 100's of dollars per purchase, and was only delivered via a single email. We had those emails marked as spam on numerous occasions.

To this day we have never sent a marketing email, or even non-transactional email - mainly because we suck at marketing, so it's not like they got confused about which email...

^ We do audio transcription, a customer sends an mp3 in, we have someone listen and type it up, and we emailed the customer the results. These days you can collect the transcripts from the website, but for years you couldn't.

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sterve 4435 days ago
Perhaps they signed up using a shared alias (marketing@...) and when you delivered the results, the original customer was happy but someone else on the alias marked it as spam.
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logicallee 4436 days ago
The ToS is just one example. If you're giving out your email address to be an early trier of a new product, there's an implicit ToS that you can receive some news about it.

An unsubscribe button = "now stop emailing me." i.e. the opposite action of signing up and giving out an email.

flagging the kinds of things OP talks about after giving out your email address is ridiculous. Giving out your email address is opting in to communication initiated by the other side, without further requests - otherwise you wouldn't be giving out your email address, they would be giving you theirs: "Email us to get a reply with our newsletter" or whatever else the OP imagines in this bizarro-world where you opt in to a specific communication.

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kaoD 4436 days ago
> If you're giving out your email address to be an early trier of a new product, there's an implicit ToS that you can receive some news about it.

And that's why I wouldn't flag them, because I solicited the email.

But I wasn't talking about that case. And you know it. Please stop.

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logicallee 4436 days ago
you listed it explicitly (your third bullet point in the original comment)
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