|
Sometimes I opt-out of email lists, but then I keep getting email from then, probably because I was on multiple email lists and only opted out of one -- altohugh when I subscribed, I subscribed only once. Sometimes I try to opt-out, but they ask me to login, and I don't remember my password because they asked me to put weird symbols and uppercase letters on it, while my normal login-everywhere password does not have these. Sometimes I try to opt-out, but the link is broken. Sometimes (this is what happens most of times) I am subscribed automatically to email lists whenever I sign up to some website. Shouldn't this be considered spam? I did not receive a confirmation email -- or maybe I did, but the confirmation email was to confirm my account on the site, not my subscription on that email list. Sometimes the sender forgets to his opt-out link. --- The question that these cases pose is: what is the difference between "spam" and "email that can be useful to others but that you don't want to receive"? And the answer is: SPAM, as explained in the original submission, is a global uncustomizable tag, if something is spam, it is spam to everybody, not just to you. That is not the ideal situation. We could do better, but I don't think it will be better within the email protocol, since it would be impossible to Google to calculate the spam-probability of each message according to its receiving user. The only way it to move to other protocols. |
`it is spam to everybody`, maybe, but Google is trusting the user to categorize SPAM, which can have some unwanted consequences.