Hacker News Reader

To add to above, also some scummy lists use the unsubscribe click as an indicator of a working email, and then classify/sell these at higher prices. And of course, you never get unsubscribed, just get added to more and more lists.

If they use mailchimp, unsubscribing gives you the opportunity to report there account as spam and get them banned from the service. Also no reason you can’t also mark it as spam in your email client too.

What incentive are you talking about ? Why is unsubscribing a good incentive ?

And are you saying when you mark an email as spam, your mail provider will give them a bad spam reputation score ?

Clicking unsubscribe relies on gentlemanship instead of self motivation to work. It relies on people respecting you and being kind, rather than doing what is best for them. This kind of system rewards unscrupulous behaviour (not respecting the click, subscribing you by default , etc).

It is a common mistake in organising workflows involving humans. It works beautifully on small groups but collapses under its own weight at scale. You will always be swimming upstream.

If you will allow me to take some liberty, this is comparable to communism vs capitalism, in practice. Loosely. :)

And yes: clicking spam makes google lower their reputation , eventually spam holing all their email directly (= disincentivising bad behaviour ). This means that now, suddenly, the company and you have the same goal: not to send you email you would consider unwanted. Currently, they can get away with spam by calling it a mailing list and adding an unsubscribe button.

I'm not sure which system you're comparing to capitalism and communism to be honest.

Capitalism reward some dishonest behavior by its nature, because the ultimate reward is money (thinking of tax evasions, stealing..) . Communism also rewards some dishonest behavior, but not the same kind (it's more like work the least to earn the same)

If everyone clicked "unsubscribe", there would be no harm in spamming you. Because if you don't want it, you just opt out with no fuss

If you click "report spam", their spam rate goes up. And after it goes past a certain %, Gmail and other clients will filter them into the "spam" folder

So it doesn't matter to click unsubscribe or not, the good action is to click spam. Thanks for the explanation !

Yeah sounds like marking as spam and then unsubscribing is the way to go.

Why would I want do download mail I don't want? Because when I refresh my IMAP client or or POP3 my mail from the remote mailbox, the messages are at least partially downloaded, and in my case fed to a local spamassassin daemon. Receiving dozens or hundreds of unwanted mail can cause the time required to process all my messages by my MTA increase significantly, and also spam that manages to make it into my inbox increases the time required for me to mentally process e-mail.

> Ironically, conditioning people to respect the unsubscribe button has, probably, insidiously led to more spam making it into people’s inboxes than anything else in recent memory.

I doubt this.

> Making them eat bad spam rep score is the only weapon we have, to make them treat our inbox with respect. Use it.

Doubt this also. A bit of manual vetting of your inbox goes a long way. And also avoiding inserting your mail address into bad websites which will sell them or whatnot, and when including it in text making sure to obfuscate it somehow. Spam filtering is vital, but it can't do all for you.

I started to setup a rule to mark newsletters as read and redirect them some info@ or simimar address of the company. I wanna waste their time if they waste my time.

Just an offshoot topic. What really grinds my gears these days is when you click unsubscribe and then they ask you to login in to change your email preferences.

I also hate that. You could claim that doing this is a violation of the CAN-SPAM act since it can be assumed that there will be people who have forgotten their password, so therefore the unsubscribe button is nonfunctional.

You're making the unwarranted assumption that the person who gave the email address is the one the address belongs to, Cf. https://xkcd.com/1279/ .

By "you", do you mean companies that send these emails? But good point. What you said is another reason that the CAN-SPAM might be violated by requiring a login to unsubscribe.

Why not both?

Marking a single email as spam doesn't do much. Marking an email as spam then continuing to receive it is weighted much higher.