Stop lying to me, email marketers | Hacker News Reader

Stop lying to me, email marketers

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25 pointsbmpafa17 comments

I've had a couple of serious offenders like this: way too many repeated emails, clearly automated but also obviously trying to deceive in that regard. In a couple of fun cases, they have used the names of actual, important people at the company as the sender - I guess to seal the deal and make me feel like this is an important email and I'm an important user.

Here's what I do to feel slightly empowered (although it has no effect other than finally stopping emails from that particular company): I call the company, and I tell them the name of the person I need to speak to urgently. Since it's the name of a VP or something often attached to these emails, that person is usually busy. But I tell the person on the other end that I've received 3 emails from them, and that they have insisted on speaking with me, and it's obviously very important. They will eventually get pulled out of a meeting to speak with me on the phone, at which point they realize that I'm responding to one of these emails. And they tell me it's fake and they didn't actually want to personally speak with me, and then I tell them the email is a lie and I hope they learned their lesson.

It's childish and stupid, but man does it make me feel good to call them on their crap.

Love it-you had me at 'childish and stupid'

If you're skeptical of marketing and able to discern lies within marketing materials, you're not the target audience. You're water in the gas tank of the world's economic engine -- but take comfort that people like you only amount to trace contamination and won't cause a stall. Just accept your lot, devnull all the ads, and move on.

"You're not the target audience, ignore it and move on" isn't a good enough reason to allow these companies to continue doing this.

Should we really just let them exploit those who aren't as good as we are at detecting this? No, no we shouldn't. Turning the other cheek because you're immune and not calling them out on it is part of the reason that advertisers have pushed further and further into exploitative methods.

Serious question then is, how do we resist? How do we act in the interests of people who often don’t see the need for help, and resent it when offered?

Adblockers, publicly and repeatedly calling them out as much as possible. Blockers for hitting them where it hurts and calling them out to try and force their tactics into daylight. Someone else in the thread mentioned a tactic they employed of calling up the company and asking to speak to the CEO/whoever felt the need to contact them so urgently. Put the onus back on them as much as possible.

In terms of our less astute friends, education and patience I guess. The idea of digital privacy has been eroded pretty far and advertisers have successfully pushed the idea that it's completely fine to give it all up and let them harass us as much as they want for the digital equivalent of shiny rocks, so we're facing a long uphill battle there.

It makes me angry to think about how true this is. My hope however, is that sophistication spreads over time. Humans right now generally stink at seeing through the most blatant manipulation and grotesque blandishments, but more can see through it than ever before. Maybe we’re going to manage to overcome our worse tendencies with practice, as a group. I think it’s our best hope.

Remember that critical thinking can be taught!

I wonder if I'm in the minority -- but when I look at unread email I see only the sender and subject. If I don't recognize the sender, and the subject line sounds like marketing-speak, including phrases such as "we've missed you" or "checking in" or "touching base" or "reaching out" or is something generic like "hey" that email is getting deleted unopened. I delete dozens of messages a day unread on that basis, and it only takes a few seconds.

Also fairly confident that many unsubscribe links have little effect.

I often wonder if I'm losing my mind thinking "I swear I unsubscribed from this last week"

Legit entities are generally very concerned about spam scores and deliverability, so will faithfully unsub you if you can fight your way through to the unsub interface. That won't get rid of everything, but it helps.

But 'unsubbing' from sketch spam will just mark your email address as known good for more spam. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Unsubbing from, say, the people you've done business with but don't want to hear from any more, is worth doing. It's not all darkness, there are shades of grey.

I get pissed off whenever I unsub from an email and get a message saying it may take two weeks for them to honor my request. Like what the hell is going on that it takes two weeks to flip a flag, even across multiple databases? Because they sure as hell won't delete your email address.

Then just mark the email as spam. This will sooner or later bite them.

TurboTax has been relentless with these kind of tactics this year. Their subject lines include words like “1 New Message” and “IRS” in varying combinations that when skimmed probably make a lot of less adept consumers think they are receiving some kind of urgent official communication.

It would be nice. Don't see it happening anytime soon, but do like this author naming and shaming.

Market opportunity: evolving spam filters to detect this nonsense.

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