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Comment by FearNotDaniel | Hacker News Reader

As somebody who likes to assume good intentions, I would have hoped your second attempt at unsubscribing was to send a polite, nonadversarial email asking to be removed from the email list you never willingly joined. Assuming that fell on deaf ears, I can understand where you're coming from.

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> I would have hoped your second attempt at unsubscribing was to send a polite, nonadversarial email asking to be removed from the email list you never willingly joined. Assuming that fell on deaf ears, I can understand where you're coming from.

No, absolutely not. You put an unsubscribe button in the footer of the email or I'm marking it as spam. That's _entirely_ on you if you don't do that.

With or without an unsubscribe link, I'm marking it as spam and blacklisting you and your service.

If the unsubscribe link requires me to sign in, or pressures me into not doing "Why do you want to unsubscribe? I never signed up. Don't you want our new offers? yes/no", you're also getting the spam report

My nonadversarial action was to ignore the first email, that's all the consideration I am willing to give. The onus is not on me to politely ask to be removed from anything.

You gave more consideration than was deserved. I would have flagged the first one as spam.

I don't assume good intentions and neither should you. If some entity emails me in an automated way without my permission and without any way to unsubscribe it's going straight in spam and being reported to any abuse/spam mechanism that's appropriate.

I get the hustling nature of HN, but this behaviour crosses a line and breaks laws in various juristictions. I don't feel the need to politely explain this to people.

> polite, nonadversarial email

Spammers are not entitled to private and nonadversarial communication.

Note that in numerous jurisdictions both sending spam and not including unsubscribe link is actively illegal.

SPAM is defined by the recipient. Expecting a polite "please unsubscribe" email is inappropriate.

Oversimplifying, but an unsubscribe link is a legal requirement under many different laws (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL) for this sort of email. It's 2022, unsubscribe links are a solved problem, I'm not going to assume good intentions for somebody who is purposefully breaking the law in order to spam me.

I think reasonable legal threat is the correct way. The spammers don't deserve anything less.

That's emotional labor and investment to do for something that was unwanted and not opted into in the first place. There's laws in place that make it mandatory to opt-in and to easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails simply because being nice about it didn't work.

That and 2 emails hardly constitute as "spam". Sure, unwanted but the guy on github and other people in the comments here act like the dude kicked a dog. People need to chill and get some real problems in their life to concern themselves over.

This is absolutely spam. Sending not just one unsolicited message but a followup nagging you for not replying is absolutely spammy behavior.

A single unwanted email is spam.

That is too much - it would need to be automated or mass send ("unwanted email" includes also things like contact attempt by disliked person which is not spam)

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