Outright spam is one thing. What’s more prevalent these days and vastly more annoying is corporate spam. Every purchase now is apparently free license to send you pure garbage emails multiple times per day.
NextDoor also used to violate the CanSpam Act by requring you to log in to unsubscribe, but they fixed that a couple of years ago.
I hate it when companies allow people to signup with email addresses that aren't theirs, never validate the email address, and then start spamming me. I mark all of those as spam. The latest offender is Chime.com (I have a common-ish FirstLast@gmail that I'm phasing away from.)
Except that Comcast/Xfinity itself is violating the CAN-SPAM act. I constantly get product offers and other junk from them, despite being clearly marked as "unsubscribed from all" when I click the unsubscribe link.
They are also a local monopoly and I have no affordable alternative for "basic broadband".
There does not seem to be any facility to report this to any regulatory agency of the US government or my state government.
[1] Or set it to bounce, but I prefer /dev/null as bouncing increases the chance I'm becoming part of a back-scatter issue.
[2] At some point soon I'll get around to cycling those addresses to something else again, I haven't for a while, then the current ones will be redirected to spam training.
[3] Including some newsletters specifically targetting people who have interacted with crowd-funding so some project's team has given my address out against my wishes⁴. I wish we could give them specific addresses when supporting, so I could tell who (I don't cycle the main address I use for such things often enough to tell).
[4] Though those have saved me money: if I think of supporting a project I search the junk file first and if it has been mentioned by “backer-update”, “grant @ t.k.p.”, “kickstartech”, etc, I'll walk away - but only one has lost my help thus far that way and doubt anyone else is doing it so this petty little victory probably means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Bouncing doesn't cause backscatter, provided it's a real bounce; that means a bounce that is a rejection by your mailserver, performed during the SMTP transaction. The message commonly known as a "bounce message" is technically known as a delivery status notification. The actual bounce message is composed by the sender's mailserver, and can't cause backscatter.
Basically, a bounce sent after the SMTP server has said "Message accepted for delivery" is a bogus bounce, and causes backscatter. Sending bogus bounces is a reprehensible practice (and quite useless).
It sometimes happens because mail gets accepted then put into a local queue for processing (anti-spam checks and other scans) and the fake bounce sent after that. A badly designed system (and such do exist) will do this even for messages they could immediately reject based on the invalid incoming address.
It can also happen because there is an intermediate SMTP server between the sender and receiver, the intermediate has dropped the connection to the sender before the final destination rejects, so if you want to bounce at all it has to be a fake bounce.
I don't know without checking (and I've been too lazy to test!) if my mail services properly bounce based on target address or fake bounce, so I err on the side of not causing disruption if it is the bad one. I'll be replacing Zimbra with something else (probably self-built from standard parts as my needs are much more limited than when I picked Zimbra many years ago, just mail, nothing else) for my main mail service soon, this will be one of the things to make sure I get right.
If you are sending good mail to a double-opt-in, highly intentful marketing list, then you will receive minimal spam complaints. If you are sending to people who don't want it (they didn't check the opt-in button), it doesn't muddy the water because it is spam.
That being said, there are legal requirements (CANSPAM) [1] for mail senders around the unsubscribe link, but there are no legal requirements around the report spam button, so either kind of works.
[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6254652?hl=en [1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
What I find most interesting about email is how some people will mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email. We send over a billion emails a month (not spam) and people’s behavior around email is fascinating.
You’ve described what happens when you report spam, but not what happens in the future when more people get upset over email and reflexively report all marketing email for accounts they chose to sign up for, and opted-in to marketing email for (by agreeing to the terms), and potentially still need transactional emails for. The average person doesn’t know the difference between transactional email and marketing email, and if you follow @Old_Thrashbarg’s advice to report any email you didn’t expect as spam before adjusting your settings, then eventually we might lose those settings as companies and providers all come to the conclusion that people can’t be bothered.
You’re also suggesting that there’s some broad segment of good marketing email that people don’t consider unsolicited or even spammy, which is by and large not true. There is practically no such thing as highly intentful ads that most people want, aside from the occasional short-lived viral campaign. By definition, marketing is a push initiated by the company to sell their wares, and most people would prefer not to watch ads given the choice.
Don’t forget that Mailchimp, Mailgun, Gmail, Hotmail, and almost every other service you can name here is actively making their income from email marketing. As much as we want to, it’s going to be difficult to block all marketing email, and they all have a vested interest in delivering email, especially from the people who are paying for the service.
I'm sure the business owner really thought he was promoting his business well but who buys bulbs in such quantities to make this worthwhile?