Maybe Tutanota.com has a lot of outlook users reporting your marketing emails as spam. I generally do this if the unsubscribe route is too painful, or even if it takes too long to load.
After feeling gaslighted by some spam emails that I was very sure I had unsubscribed from, I started keeping a spreadsheet to track my requests with date, and what link I followed to get removed. Almost 25% of my requests have never been honoured, it's disgusting.
But when you have dozens of databases, each owned by a different company, and they feed off each other perhaps once a day, then you can end up with a long time before all your data is deleted.
Even worse though are places like Atlassian, which add a footer to some of their emails like "this email can't be unsubscribed from".
Even though it's directly illegal for them to have emails that can't be unsubscribed from.
It's their own special "Fuck You!" message to their email recipients.
But the concept of your comment "they're just doing what they want because they reckon they can get away with it" is pretty common among large tech companies.
Those links are often spammer controlled and just confirm your email address as valid.
Personally, my email is text only. It drops all HTML. I prefer it this way. :)
I own my own email domain, and I use a different email address per service. I have done so for 13 years.
On legitimate emails, unsubscribe works correctly almost every time.
True spam seems to originate from a handful of compromised services like LinkedIn, parkmobile, etc. I don’t hit unsubscribe on those, but I don’t see how it would make things any worse.
They get the spam flag too for not being respectful of my inbox.
As if there is even single counter-example you should just automatically mark it spam and then email providers should blacklist the domain.
Are you 100% sure you never just signed up for a newsletter and forgot about it?
Are you 100% sure your email didn't end up there in some other way?
I used to send out some newsletters for my website; just a programming blog thingy. It was just a form with a simple program on the server to collect email addresses. Wrote everything myself; no external service or whatnot involved.
I got some pretty aggressive replies about people who insisted that I was spamming them. Did they forget (I didn't send out the newsletter very often)? Did someone typo their email and end up at the wrong person? Did some bot maybe fill in the form and pass the little captcha I added? Who knows. All I know is that there was a legit POST /subscribe request.
And as someone who also worked with spam prevention: it's this kind of stuff that also makes legit spam detection harder than it needs to be. The "Report spam" button is not a "fuck you" button, but unfortunately many people seem to use it as such.
And it took me a minute to find phishing mail with unsubscribe link. Which entirely proves my original point. Sure those sending phishing mails won't stop the mails I probably ordered somewhere?
You weren't talking about phishing before. You're shifting this to something radically different.
> Yeah no. Emails which include an unsubscribe link are legit enough to not do that. Actual spammers don't bother to include an unsubscribe link.
I found a phishing email with unsubscribe link. Thus I think we can generalize that emails containing unsubscribe in general are not legit nearly enough of times to trust that. Thus only correct and safe way is to mark them as spam and let the email provider eventually to handle them correctly for everyone.
99% of the time you explicitly unsubscribed from all categories, but the sender just added a new one and helpfully opted you in. So, yes, "fuck you".
You are pretty much suggesting the very thing Microsoft is doing here.
This is not a serious suggestion in any shape or form.
[1]: A number I have serious doubts about by the way, but we'll use it for now.
As I mentioned before, even with the best of intentions people can "construe your email as spam".
People mark emails as spam as "fuck you". Bad support? Spam! Argument with a friend? Spam! Yes, people really do this.
People can abuse your platforms in way you didn't foresee: either an outright security flaw or a "logic flaw" (e.g. one system I worked on the rate-limiter could be bypassed by using Cc, which was of course quickly solved, but people did unfortunately use it to send out spam).
If you have any sort of "sign-up", even if paid only, people will try to abuse it to send spam.
People's computers get hacked, and while botnet spam is less of an issue due to residential ISPs blocking SMTP traffic, abusing the hacked machine's Outlook or whatnot still happens.
There's tons of cases where regular well-intentioned people send out spam. Anyone who claims any different has never seriously worked on any kind of anti-spam system with real-world usage. If this was an easy problem it would be a solved problem, but it's not, because it's a hard problem.
But the onus should be on the model builders not on the final user.
For me, I can be pretty sure as I have extensive email archives.
Before claiming I've not signed up for stuff I check them first. :)
No matter how spammy a sender is, an unsubscribe click is a big signal that they don't want to contact that email account again. It takes time and money to warm up a domain, prepare it for outbound email, and keep it from being blacklisted when you're sending out a high volume of mail. The days where someone can just spin up an email server in a couple of minutes and blast hundreds of thousands of people with spam are over. If you don't manage your reputation you'll get blacklisted in a matter of hours. The #1 way as a mailer to manage your reputation is to respect unsubscribe requests.
Yes, clicking the unsubscribe link indicates that there's a real human checking the mailbox. But data resellers have many ways to verify the validity of a mailbox that are more effective than this one. And unlike this one, they don't indicate that the person dislikes receiving unsolicited email. So very few data resellers use unsubscribe clicks as a way to verify email validity, because if they do they'll be polluting their product with the emails of people who are likely to get pissed off by unsolicited mail, report it and get a customer's domain blacklisted. If the data reseller is selling "verified" data that is getting his customers blacklisted - he won't be in business for much longer.
It's worth pointing out that not all unsolicited mail is illegal. There are exceptions carved out in US CAN-SPAM and in other jurisdictions. If you're a business in the US the law is basically that people can send you unsolicited marketing emails whether you like it or not, as long as they provide an unsubscribe link and respect your request if you click it. To not use the mechanism that is explicitly required by the law for your protection is shortsighted.
Plus the link is always at the bottom in a tiny footer.
The mark as spam button has no such issue and hurts the sender to boot.
I also haven't seen those email addresses passed on to someone else (I use unique aliases).
No, not absolutely.
I presume you are operating under the assumption that most bulk email comes from the big providers like AWS and MailChimp (who in fact uses on SendGrid underneath). And yes, under those circumstances you are correct. Those big firms whose day job is sending "spam" have a huge incentive to ensure you don't outright reject the spam - if they don't the reputation of the IP Address ranges they are sending from get trashed. For example, they go to the trouble of wrapping every link in the email with a redirect via them, so they can monitor what emails from them you are engaging with.
But I have some news for you - the vast bulk of spam does not come from them. Maybe you aren't aware of that because you use an email provider like GMail or Outlook. They stop most of this other spam (which is how we get to the headline). But nonetheless it's there, and if it does sneak through and you click on the unsubscribe link you no only won't be unsubscribed, you confirming your a real human will ensure you will be subscribed to many spam emails.
But if you landed in a mailing list, there are quite high changes that the unsubscribe link is legit.
So if you send me a marketing email, it's spam because I didn't ask for it. It may be legal but that doesn't impress me.
But I'm pretty sure that some people who actually signed up on purpose to be on some mailing list just click the spam button not to see them any more, because they are not any more interested, or for whatever other reason.
"Legit" in that it will unsubscribe you from that exact list but not the 100 others they added you to at the same time.
If you want to get people to click a link in your malicious booby trapped email, then an "unsubscribe" one is high on the list to include. :)
But if the mail is unsolicited or the unsubscribe link doesn't work then absolutely yes, mash that spam button.
Which is not ideal, and might explain why Gmail routinely puts perfectly legit correspondence in my spam folder - again and again.
I realize this might well be a problem stemming from email clients having but one option to flag emails: spam. Ideally one should have more options - as it is scamming, spoofing and innocuous unsolicited marketing (and slow loading messages it seems) are all put in the same basket.
it is all spam; none of us want to see any of it, why do we need more fine grained control?
This "users can't handle fine-grained control" philosophy is stupifying users IMO. Granted, many don't have the knowhow, but they could just use the (hypothetical) dislike button, and the anti-spam AI could in that case place little weight to their judgement call. The interested user could instead be placed on a journey to be ever more adept at identifying email misuse.
Edit: as another commenter mentions, at present these completely unreliable signals to the anti-spam software causes for example Gmail to put perfectly legit emails in the spam folder - so I have to wade through a load of junk anyway (otherwise the legit messages in there gets deleted after 30 days).
The system is broken, and people reporting irrelevant things as spam is most likely a part of it.
Also "I don't remember signing up to this newsletter" is mostly a case of pre-checked "consent" to mails or companies packing on newsletter subscription as a requirement to some unrelated service. That's also spam.
OK thanks, my bad. But you also seem to miss something, namely my point: you seem to imply that I'd be opposed to users marking unsolicited or dark pattern mailing lists emails as spam, if they indeed are such. Or that the existence of such emails somehow undermines my point. But that's not it.
The overarching problem is of course spam in the first place, secondly the substandard systems that email services use to identify spam. In third place I'd place the problem I raised, that legit emails are not delivered correctly, where part of the problem seems to be that users use the 'spam' label as a dislike button.
But here's the kicker: this last problem is mainly what might threaten email as a means of correspondence, period: If I get a lot of junk then I can sift that out to get to my real messages. But if my real messages don't reach me at all then that's likely game over for the email era.
Those are all spam. Especially unsolicited marketing. Fuck everyone who sends that, and I hope they get banned from whatever provider they use and it kills their company. I always report all of those even with an unsubscribe link, as it’s not as if I can trust them not to use "unsubscribe" as a "send more spam" signal, they’ve already proven themselves untrustworthy by not using double-opt-in.
Though with some providers even "mark as spam" seems to be able to leak your email as they send reports which contain the message-id. Good in our case as we don’t want to spam anyone and can then blacklist the address, but bad in case you report evil spammers.