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The depressing part is reading the comments here on HN and realizing that some people just don't see what the problem is. Ok, fine, forget about the ethical aspects here and understand that when you spam your customers like this you tarnish your image because you're effectively putting yourself in the same category as the people who try to sell fake rolex watches and viagra pills.

I suggest that the next time a business, startup or not, tries to "lifecycle email" (yuck) you, don't unsubscribe - spam flag them. If some business people have such warped understanding of reality that they can't see spam when they send it, at least they can get penalized for it.

Haha, this is a totally fair thing to say. Talking about marketing, one can start to dehumanize people, and that is never good.

There are some (many?) legitimate cases where I will sign up for a service and forget about it. (Rackspace's onboarding email says it best: "Did you get a text message? Meeting invite? It's okay, here, finish signing up.")

If you sign up for Everlane, you do so because you are legitimately interested in buying new clothes. Fashion changes, and if they can keep me abreast of the latest and greatest, then I am getting value.

If I signed up for Weebly because I need to publish a website, but for whatever reason I drop off, maybe their prompting will prompt me to go ahead and finish my site so that I can show it off to my friends.

Of course, it's hard to know whether a customer will fall into one of those buckets, or "I just wanted to check out the site, leave me alone!"

Maybe it is analogous to dating: flirting with someone is okay if the other person reciprocates, otherwise it is "creepy."

I suggest that the next time a business, startup or not, tries to "lifecycle email" (yuck) you, don't unsubscribe - spam flag them.

Much as I smiled a wry grin at this suggestion, I have to say, don't fucking do this. Be an adult: if you signed up for something, take the time to try and unsubscribe first. No way to unsubscribe? Unsubscribe doesn't work? Okay, now you should start flagging as spam.

Unsubscribing has the added benefit of being more direct, in a "hey, we spammed this guy with 4 emails in three days, then he suddenly unsubscribed", instead of going "why are we being marked as spam? our lists are completely opt-in!".

Giving a company my email is not implicit permission to email me whenever they want. If you actually checked the box "yes, please email me," then yes, you gave permission. But if I did no such thing, then it is spam.

I may be entirely wrong here, but I think it is.

> the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.

I'm pretty sure that giving your e-mail is explicit permission and an unsubscribe link makes it still-revocable. That said I completely appreciate that emotionally it feel like spam, and I can't imagine why any business in their right mind would feel this was a good business practice.

source: http://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/

Whether or not we consider that "spam" is a semantic argument. I do, because it litters my inbox and pisses me off. I recognize that people may want to distinguish it from bulk email from entities that you have no prior relationship with, but to me, that's immaterial.

No, giving my e-mail address is just that - giving an email address; it does not come with permission to send automated daily emails. For example, I login to facebook with my email address, but I have explicitly withdrawn any permission for facebook to send me any notifications by email in all the opt-out settings.

Subscribing to messages should be explicitly opt-in, and in a bunch of countries is legally required to be opt-in. If I miss an opt-out checkbox, and you send a marketing email - that is spam by definition, if gmail decides to filter you out, then by all means it was the right thing to do; and if it was a local business, they would be fined for that.

Luckily, the customer still has control over what spam means to them. If you're requiring an e-mail login on your site just so you can loophole your way into inundating me with e-mails sent by a machine, then I'm marking it as spam.

I don't know why you are quoting spamhaus definition for spam, that is not relevant for the GP. Neither is the can-spam acts definition.

I use (and suspect the GP does too) use something like the following definition:Spam is email you don't want - it doesn't matter if you signed up with a company or not if you don't want a particular email it is spam.

Now as a practical matter I tend to click unsubscribe if it exists, mostly because otherwise the spam filters quality drops too far, but I still consider it spam.

It has been a long held view that that unsubscribe links should be avoided.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/series/target-5/lis...

People aren't going to trust your email marketing when you spew out so much email that it appears to be unwanted. If you look like spam, you're going to be treated as such.

Every once and a while, people listen to what they're told.

Except, you know, if you signed up for it, you should really try to do the right thing and unsubscribe. Can't remember whether you signed up for it or not? Maybe you're signing up for too many things (and, yes, I agree that there's far too much of "sign up to find out more!").

Many people don't understand the why's of something, so when they hear 'don't ever press an Unsubscribe button' they never hit unsubscribe buttons, even for services they know they signed up for. People will remember things when it is most inconvenient for you.

Also, they may have signed up to find out more because they wanted to find out more right then. After they learned more, they no longer cared. Since they no longer cared and there was no presented way right then to indicate they don't care, they may look at further marketing emails as spam, especially when there is a lot of them and not a simple follow up 'we miss you' a couple of weeks later.

Just because you know you're not sending out spam, doesn't mean that what you are sending doesn't look like spam to the receiver.

It actually saddens me that pressing the "Spam" button in Gmail has a material impact on the company that sent me the email. I use that button to mean "Get this out of my hair. Unsubscribe, bin it, set a filter to ignore them - whatever, I just don't want to see it any more!"

That Google then turns around and treats my signal as an indication of the level of trustworthiness of the whole company, and then uses this level for other users is actually irritating to me. I'm just using the user interface in the most convenient manner to me. Yes, I should go and unsubscribe - but that's laborious, and clicking "Spam" isn't.

How is clicking "unsubscribe" laborious? (Assuming, of course, the link is there, as it seems to be for most 'legitimate' spam)

It takes at least five seconds out of my life. Sure, not much. But certainly more than the 0.5s it takes to hit the keystroke to mark as spam.

And that five seconds is a lowball estimate if the unsubscribe link is actually to a "manage your email notifications settings" page as is so common these days.

There needs to be a 'best practices' for the unsubscribe option. In the ideal case, you click unsubscribe in the email and are taken to a webpage either confirming your choice or asking you to click a single confirmation button. But sometimes you have to re-enter your email address to unsubscribe, or login to your account to do so.

If I'm reading email on my phone I don't want to have to spend 30 seconds entering my email address or looking up the password for some account I haven't used in months. In the worst case I've lost my password or someone else has used my email address by mistake, and then I'm forced to find the password reset option, re-check my email, and change the password just to unsubscribe. By that point just clicking 'spam' and getting the email out of my inbox starts to sound like a good idea.

I can kind of sympathize; many email providers have made it really easy to flag something as spam. Compare one click which submits it as spam and moves you to the next email, to multiple clicks, perhaps with some scanning of text on the unsubscribe page, which probably took some time to load, not to mention that the unsubscribe link might be anywhere in the message.

IMHO, unsubscribe links should take one click, and should be at the top of the message, clearly marked. Even if you accidentally click it, so what? Just have another link on the resulting unsubscribe page to immediately undo the unsubscribe. Also, having better support in mail clients for unsubscribe mechanisms (I know Mailman puts in a header with an unsubscribe link, clearly labelled), would be a good idea. I could even see spam handling systems getting a little more sophisticated (if they aren't already), and attempt to unsubscribe via methods in the email first, then if that same email address gets any more email from that source, autoblock it as spam.

Be an adult: if you signed up for something, take the time to try and unsubscribe first.

I have a hard time keeping track of which companies I actually want emails from and how many companies tricked me into signing up for email by defaulting the "Spam me with marketing" somewhere on the page I used to sign up. Especially if a company is inconsistent with emails (no emails for a year, then 5 in a week).

So, sometimes I just get sick of dealing with it and start marking things as spam.

Unsubscribing has the added benefit of being more direct, in a "hey, we spammed this guy with 4 emails in three days, then he suddenly unsubscribed", instead of going "why are we being marked as spam? our lists are completely opt-in!".

The answer to both of those questions is the same.

Except as an email admin, the answers aren't the same. Suddenly getting all your emails as bouncing, and the receivers won't tell you why? Maybe some retard marked your IP as dynamic or dialup. Get a whole swath of people unsubscribing after you send a bunch of emails? Pretty sure sign to tone it down a bit.

I don't appreciate getting bogged down in automated emails anymore than the next person, but that's one of the reasons I don't hand out my email address very often. People should really be careful who they give their email address to, and less websites should require an email address for anything but business and very obvious newsletters.

> Except as an email admin, the answers aren't the same. Suddenly getting all your emails as bouncing, and the receivers won't tell you why? Maybe some retard marked your IP as dynamic or dialup. Get a whole swath of people unsubscribing after you send a bunch of emails? Pretty sure sign to tone it down a bit.

Sure. But at the same time, if the company intentionally requires a daily amount of attention from prospective customers, it is not entirely unfair if prospective customers occasionally cause some measure of inconvenience from the company. If you don't value my time, why should I value yours? Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Companies you have heard of put friction on unsubcribes. Ever seen "Edit your mail settings" at the bottom of an email? They think that creating an account constitutes opt-in.

If you had them calling you everyday, you'd surely want to block the calls instead of calling them back and requesting them to stop calling. (I realize emails are less intrusive.)

And I don't care much for the company, I just want to use their services. I don't want their email barrage flooding my inbox. I shouldn't have to put up with it just because I'm an 'adult'. Spam is pretty much anything in my inbox that I didn't expect and don't want.

As far as I'm concerned, a single unsolicited message from anyone with no personal connection to myself constitutes spam. Obviously opt-in lists are a different story.

Anecdotally, most people aren't going to go through the couple or three clicks to unsubscribe. This is what spammers rely on.

I flag twitter and facebook We-haven't-seen-you-in-a-long-time messages as spam. Because those emails are also about selling a product. But as someone who runs a tiny niche forum, I am tempted to mail users to return. So I am in a dilemma of sorts morally.

I have this argument with people I work with all the time because I'm the only one that's allowed to send out e-mail blasts.

"WAHH, my 1% OFF sale is soooo important that I want to make sure nobody misses it. Can we send it out on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday? NO??? Do you realize that you're KILLING our business?"

No. Everyone hates spam. Go away.

HN always seemed a roulette to me. Remember that article where a guy makes his gf signup for Spotify and Spotify tries to match the same credentials to Facebook, then logs in, reactivates her account and adds the app to her FB? Most of the comments were surprisingly supportive of Spotify. And today we have an article on the front page about URLs posted in chats being visited for malware checks.

I used to work for a flash sales website, and whenever I told people about it, they'd uniformly say "Oh yeah, I've signed up for them! Way too many emails, can you make it stop?"

You recognise that emails from a flash sales website are vastly different than those from a service you're trying out, right?

One is about "Hey, buy X and Y today!" and the other "Hey, here's a cool feature in the product you're trying out!"

Not all emails are born equal.

The thing is, there is a tension between "customers don't want to be spammed" and "spamming customers produces appreciable and measurable results". For every N disengaged customers you annoy with the unsolicited mail, you re-engage M who simply forgot about you. Tuning that ratio is hard, and sadly poorly suited to advice like "don't send spammy reminders".

I'd conjecture that "lots of spam" probably increases short-term engagement, but if these people have to be emailed very frequently to use your product, are they really interested in using your product over the long term? Are those the kinds of customers you want to have?

Yes. At least in this example, (if it succeeded) you'd end up with a website on their service after this. Regardless how hard it was to get you there, you no longer are a customer that has to be emailed frequently to use the product. You are now just a customer.

You forgive Everlane because you like their emails.

If many of Weebly's actual signups have a reaction similar to your Everlane reaction, something like "NEATO I'D FORGOTTEN I WANTED TO GET MY WEBSITE UP WITH THAT BENEFIT", then what's the problem?

I guess I'd ask the question like this: is there no room for taste [1] when it comes to emails?

We can all agree that different audiences will find a particular email more or less engaging. The same way we might say "mathematics is beautiful", is there any room for saying "that marketing campaign" or "the way they engaged with their customers" is elegant?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

It's worth remembering that the Weebly emails were sent more frequently then the Everlane ones. An email every month or so? Ok, not a problem. An email every day for more then a week? Back off.

Email volume does matter. You can send too many emails and annoy your users.

I'm not sure they're the best example to use, since Everlane uses popover signup forms on every single page you visit until you create an account. Maybe once you're onboard they get a little less desperate.