Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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Those unsubscribe links should be there, for several reasons.

- The service-based economy means that entities (individuals and businesses) have numerous relationships. For the typical individual the number of password-based accounts crossed the 100 threshold years ago, at a doubling rate of every 2--3 years.

- Responsibilities can be transferred. The person who signed up for your service 5 years ago may no longer be at the company.

- List purging is a Real Thing. A few years back I'd worked for an organisation that had ... numerous relationships ... with individuals and corporations. These received regular email messages. Nominally, requested. Included amongst these was a major Wall Street financial firm whose implosion years earlier hit lead news and headlines worldwide. Despite not existing for years, there remained hundreds if not thousands of addresses being sent email on a regular ongoing basis.

- Mail can be forwarded. It's quite possible that you're sending mail to one address that is is being forwarded, manually or automatically, to others. This raises issues in unsubscribe requests, but might at the least be an opportunity to reach out to your customer to clarify the situation.

- I don't know if revisiting email contact approval on a regular basis (say once every year or two) is yet a recommended practice, but I'd strongly suggest that it be so.

Your hat may be less blisteringly white than you presume.

Everything you've said makes perfect sense - for a contact management function.

We have that. You can change contact info, set owner/technical/emergency contacts, alert thresholds, etc.

But unsubscribe means something totally different:

When I click on unsubscribe I want it to be the end of all communications. Period.

In this case, that makes no sense. Ceasing communications for all purposes implies service cancellation and, in our case, service cancellation implies a human interaction confirming data destruction.

How would we confirm data destruction for your implied cancellation if no further contact is permitted ?

You, and the blacklist operators, have become so jaded by the abuse you've suffered that you've forgotten that legitimate, paid services exist. I'm sorry.

You may have missed that bit in my earlier comment about working for a paid service provider.

An unsubscribe link doesn't have to immediately cancel all service and communication. It can simply lead to account settings or even to a page explaining how to cancel the account.

From a comment below from the other side of the equation it sounds like the email in question WAS indeed marketing for a lifetime promotion.

People should have every right to unsubscribe themselves from that, and thus should have some sort of feedback loop attached to the email being sent (to the detriment of your bottom line I fully understand and sympathize with).

If this was indeed a marketing email, then I don't think it matters if it comes from a "legitimate, paid service" - the receiver still should be able to choose if they want to receive sales related emails wouldn't you agree?

"People should have every right to unsubscribe themselves from that, and thus should have some sort of feedback loop attached to the email being sent (to the detriment of your bottom line I fully understand and sympathize with)."

I agree.

We have a flag for such a thing and set that flag when people ask us to. They ask us in a nice email exchange between human beings. We're very responsive to this since they are our paying customers.

That's the big disconnect here: it's inconceivable to many people (including abusix, et. al) that healthy, straightforward interactions like this occur in 2022.

In their mind there are nothing but robots and newsletter subscribers forever locked in an arms race.

I'm sorry that is the case.

Did they request this marketing message through a "nice email exchange between humans"? Or did you automatically sign up this person for marketing then expect them to manually contact you?

You are wayyy to smart not too see the abusive asymmetrical theater of that scheme.

The flag for marketing etc. should be automated, I understand account-related emails like billing not having "unsubscribe" links but promotions definitely need one. Clicking that would then toggle the flag (and maybe have one in their account panel).

Atleast in my country, to send legitimate marketing e-mails, a user has to be given a choice to opt-out *before* the first e-mail.

So it's not enough to allow them to opt-out with an e-mail exchange or an unsubscribe link, you must allow the user to opt out when you initially gather the contact information.

If that wasn't done, it's illegal (and unethical) to send marketing e-mails, even from a paid service.

Your earlier argument about unsubscribe being effectively an informal termination only works if you properly separate that side from all promotional/marketing/new features/etc material, otherwise it seems you are avoiding the main point and purpose of the unsubscribe button

I strongly disagree. There is absolutely no need to put an unsubscribe link into a transactional email.

All emails should of course contain enough information to make it clear who the message is from, why the message is being sent, and who it was sent to.

But there is no point in adding unsubscribe links to messages and notifications that are essential to the service.

I mean, what are you going to do if the user accidentally clicks "unsubscribe", and then a payment doesn't go through? Should you just cancel their account without informing them? That's absurd.

I'd be really pissed if eg. my backups were deleted because I accidentally unsubscribed from emails from a cloud service provider.

> There is absolutely no need to put an unsubscribe link into a transactional email.

Agreed. rsync alluded to it below as well.

'unsubscribe'... from what? If I just bought something from service ABC, and I get an email from ABC saying "you just bought foo from us"... what would an 'unsubscribe' even mean? "Do not ever email me about this purchase again?" "Do not ever email me about future purchases?"

> Do not ever email me about this purchase again

Please send me the order, just don't send me the PDF invoice :)

This actually does cause problems with blocked password resets and things

If I request a password reset, that constitutes an approval to send me that email.

And if I didn't request a password reset ... I'd like to hear about it.

how do you know it's 'you' that requested it? if I requested a password reset to your email... is it spam?

Some systems might just block all outgoing emails to anyone who has clicked unsubscribe which would block password resets as well

What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this.

My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.

That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them. Ideally you should just be able to reply to the message and tell them about the error. If there's no way to contact a company, that's a whole different problem, and not really one that would be fixed with unsubscribe links in important email messages.

In 99% of the cases - there is no recourse. In one instance, I tried replying and they asked me to prove my identity as the customer to cancel the emails.

I have a few hundred dollars worth of gift cards for an Australian store received as gifts over several years.

The company won’t talk to me, and the sender sends a lovely message, but no contact information.

This, I've had people receiving bank alerts for an account they don't own and they can't be stopped. What these companies lack are customer-centric processes that they've thought through.

Wtf is wrong with putting contact information in the unsubscribe link, or reach out productively on request? Why would you presume somebody clicks it by accident vs. the much more likely case of it being a legitimate request? Are you afraid they really want to cancel your service? Or are you afraid you can't send spam under the guise of transactional messages? Or worse, listen to customers about how best to alert them? Truly ridiculous!

> Wtf is wrong with putting contact information in the unsubscribe link

By law, depending where you are, a unsubscribe link has to be instant. So there can not be an intermediate screen asking for confirmation or showing contact information. Well, you could show contact information, but then the unsubscribe (of in this case service critical mails, thus the service itself) had already happened.

I'm assuming you're referring to the CAN-SPAM Act [1] or equivalent in other jurisdiction [2], but nothing of the sort is implied. The requirement is to make available and process opt-out without charge and promptly (typically in so many days).

It is neither dire nor prevents clarification, nor prescribes a specific experience related to unsubscribe links. It's odd to hear the only options are between receiving messages and having service terminated. That sounds pretty user-hostile tbh.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

[2] https://www.lsoft.com/resources/optinlaws.asp

Oh, interesting! https://www.rapidmail.de/blog/welche-vorgaben-gelten-bei-der... claims the same for Germany. That makes it a bit easier to find a solution.

> That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them.

That implies a level of manual effort on the part of the recipient that's unreasonable. I have no relationship with these companies. They did not verify the email address before starting to send a stream of supposedly transactional messages to it. They should be happy that I'm willing to click unsubscribe when available, because the alternative is to set up a mark-as-spam filtering rule that'll hopefully tank their sender reputation.

Writing them via a contact form begging to be removed is not an option.

Yup. And is this situation the recipient will just mark it as spam. Because to them that's what it is.

You can create a Gmail filter to delete or archive them automatically and avoid poisoning the spam filter.

But...it is spam? If they don't give the tools necessary to stop the spam (unsubscribe or a link to "received this by mistake") then it's spam - intentional or not.

It's not on me to do their job for them. It costs time and hence money.

If I get continuously get emails sent to me that I did not request and I can't unsubscribe to, then it's spam. Maybe companies should make sure they're not sending emails to the wrong person, because I'm just going to keep marking it as spam when it comes my way.

Exactly. "Poisoning" the spam filter is nothing more than sending an alert back to upstream to deal with it when and where it starts to hurt business. Typically it's the only feedback mechanism taken seriously and thus a service to the community.

Emails should be confirmed before being used for ongoing communication. Simple as that. It’s easier to get right up front than it is to clutter and confuse in the cases already illustrated.

Sure - but these companies aren't doing that. They're sending emails without any means of preventing it, e.g. spam.

You're expecting that a company incompetent enough to attach unverified email addresses to an account to "correctly" deal with unsubscribing from transactional email? This seems entirely futile and counter-productive to me. (Correctly in scare quotes because I can't fathom what a correct automated unsubscribe would look like in this situation.)

Yeah, I run my own email server and have the same issues with the same services as the person who wrote the piece this links to.

In my case users are sending estimates and invoices and monthly statements to their clients and while fake invoices may be a spammer thing those clients know who's sending them an invoice, and why and what for, so an 'Unsubscribe" link would be completely out of context because they are not subscribed to any email list.

I've had the same domain name for over 20 years now and none of my users have ever used my apps to send spam. And as spam and email volume go my server isn't even close to sending out a lot of email.

When I set up a new email server last year, with a new IP address, I had to go through the process of getting white listed. All the big email service providers have ways to do that. Google made it very easy. They gave you a unique string to add it to your DNS records and that's it. Microsoft is so convoluted I've still not gotten anywhere with them. Comcast and others had a few hoops and ladders but nothing that got me stuck.

Personally, while it's a bit of a PITA to setup and manage an email server, it's been worth it.

I used "Mail-in-a-Box". It's pretty easy to set one up with that. It has a built-in DNS server and that's a really great thing to have for managing several domain names and as many email addresses as you want. I've setup email accounts for family and friends as well as throwaways for my wife, who signs up for everything she sees on the internet.

I can move the IP address of my email server to the top of the list in my Mac's System Preferences for DNS and start testing new domain names and changes to the DNS immediately. I don't have to wait for those to propagate to whatever my access provider is using.

So I have 3 servers. An Email/DNS server, a database server, and a website/webapp server running on DigitalOcean's "Droplets". It's a bit of work for a small shop but it's much easier to manage once it's setup and I don't have to worry about any 3rd party service selling out or going under or changing their API to something entirely different. All of which has happened to me in the past.

We add link to accounts page to manage notifications - but we clearly say that certain notifications can be disable only by deleting the account.

But even that does not help: some people just do not understand how to manage their email: they will consider as “spam” any email they receive and they cannot act on it immediately. Like storage quota reached, cc expired, or similar. There is some strange feeling that if they ignore the email and mark it as spam that the problem will magically disappear.

We have so many cases like that: and they then contact us with questions like “why my service is not working” etc.

I bet Netflix has same issues…

You guys are thinking way too literally and rigidly about this. Unsubscribe in a transactional email does not need to be an automated stop. Just have it open a support ticket and then follow up to find out why they clicked unsubscribe.

If they are an established customer, it is legal to do that in all jurisdictions, even under GDPR.

It’s much better than having a customer mark it as spam, as some people will definitely do if they can’t see how to unsubscribe.

I've also had email from the wrong person delivered to me some times. One company in particular kept sending updates for a service I had no way of using. An unsubscribe link would have been handy, though confirming email addresses before linking them to an account would also be a good idea, probably.

Those unsubscribe links should be there, for several reasons.

In some jurisdictions there is information that businesses are legally required to provide to their customers in a permanent form and email is the conventional (and potentially the only) way of satisfying that requirement.

IMHO, it is not helpful for anyone to have a system where recipients may not understand this and may treat that mail as spam, yet businesses are compelled to send it anyway.

Mail may also be simply going to the completely wrong address, for some reason, and there needs to be some way to ask that this be corrected without requiring credentials that the recipient might not have. If not an unsubscribe link, then at least a reply-to address that actually works, or some way to handle a mistake.

I had one email address that for some reason often ended up being mistakenly used for other people, and ended up enormously frustrated by the usual combinations of no unsubscribe links, no-reply senders, and notes that any changes should be made by logging in. In the worst case, the US Department of Education, for several years, sent the address private personal and financial details about a complete stranger at a university with student loans. There was no way for me to unsubscribe, and no monitored address to reply to: in their view, they were important emails for the recipient, and they were, but I was not the intended recipient at all.

I treat every unsubscribe link as though it read "click here to confirm your email address is live and being used by a human being so it will command a higher value when we resell it".

If I don't like an email I never unsub. I add it to the spam filter.

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