> That’s why you can now block specific email addresses in Gmail [...] Future mail will go to the spam folder (and you can always unblock in Settings).
It's nice to have a one-click button for it, but this was already available by configuring a filter. You just need to select all emails from a particular address and then choose to always mark them as spam or send them directly into the trash. From the headline I was thinking that they changed it so that you could keep email from an address from ever being delivered to your account in any form.
Any feature complicated enough to implement is indistinguishable from a missing feature.
Would be interested to hear why it took so long to add this one-click functionality, which is common across clients, to Gmail. There must have been some internal disagreement on its implementation?
Still, this is an easier way to apply that filter. I've found filters to not always be that easy to set up... so I can only imagine how average users deal with them, aka probably not at all.
I wonder though if they have taken it out of the filter flow. Filters are interesting in that they can really slow things down, and if a previous one fires before the send to trash one does, sometimes it has a different result. If they have called this out as a behavior that can happen on the inbound pipeline, and more importantly if they can reflect it back as a 5xx error to the sender, it would be nice improvement.
Seems like the Inbox team has rethought the filter flow at least in terms of UI and there are clearly some architecture/backend changes too. Perhaps this new "block" flow in GMail is a reflection of working together with the Inbox team.
Filters apply on a dumb level: do this if exactly this address, etc. I hope this would apply on a higher, "do what I mean" level: attempt to figure out if each new From address is actually the same person or organization as one you've already blocked, and, if so, add it to the "contact" of the blocked party so that it's blocked too.
Depends on how they expose the UI for it. You could have a bin at the bottom of your inbox labelled "messages from recently auto-blocked senders"—with the messages still technically in the Spam folder and liable to be erased after 30 days, but exposed so you don't have to hunt through your "confirmed spam" to see them.
Throw in a little tweak to detect if you go on vacation (e.g. no messages opened in the last week, etc.) and pause the "decay" of messages in the spam folder until you get back, and it'd be just as safe as the system we have now.
A nice fix for the companies that, either by malice or incompetence, use one regex for their original email field and then another for the email field used to unsubscribe. IOW, if you ordered something, used "foobar+musiciansfriend@gmail.com" (which Musician's Friend takes just fine), then went to unsubscribe, the email field regex for that screen will complain about the "+". Off to the spam bucket you go, Musician's Friend, and my purchase dollars now go to Sweetwater.
Several people have responded to this recommending restraint with the "Spam" button. I disagree. I work for an email service provider; if our customers have a bad unsubscribe method, sometimes the only way to communicate that is to give them a higher complaint rate by clicking "Spam". The customer then comes to us to ask what's wrong, then we analyze their setup and tell them.
In the short term, spam complaints hurt reputation and reduce deliverability, but if a sender is failing to employ email best practices, can they be surprised if they don't have the best results?
The problem is that people make up all sorts of ridiculous "laws" in their heads, and get extremely self-righteous when those invented, nonsensical rules are violated. Email service providers are exceedingly conservative, and will nearly always side with these people, even if they're lunatics.
For example: sending someone an unsolicited email is not spam. If it were, then nearly every person with an email account would be guilty of bulk spamming. Yet many people have no hesitation about clicking the spam button when they get a message from someone they don't know. Email providers are so scared of this that many officially require double-opt-in procedures in order to open an account. That's insane.
I don't mind it when someone emails me, personally, one time with an unsolicited business offer that is specific to me. It's unambiguously legal, and it's a good thing that we can send each other messages without having to pre-authorize the message. But when people send me the "follow up" on their last unsolicited message? Then they get the spam button and a block.
I think you're talking about a different use case. The original subject in this thread was about mailing lists that are difficult to unsubscribe from.
I would say (and a legal interpretation of CAN-SPAM would agree) that an unsolicited mass campaign of emails are spam, are not wanted, and aren't legal in the US. A fully individualized, tailored email probably doesn't fall in this class of email.
Double-opt-in is a good email practice. There are several reasons for this.
1. Ensure the email address actually belongs to the account holder. Some people make up an address with a common name instead of using a throwaway email provider, such as Mailinator.
2. Demonstrate to email service providers that the lists are legitimate and aren't used for unsolicited marketing. Many whitelisting and un-blacklisting negotiations are still handled by people. Good practices are important for reputation management.
I don't mind it when someone emails me, personally, one time with an unsolicited business offer that is specific to me.
That's like .01% of the email I get. Maybe you are different. The ones that seem to be tailored to me are really just a template with my name substituted. I think we can all recognize those and agree they are spam.
You're making a distinction that doesn't work. At what point does an email become "tailored"? Five words? Ten? If someone sends you an unsolicited sales pitch that is mostly identical to the one they're sending to five hundred other people, but uses your name and adds a sentence saying that they "admire the work you've done with $X", is it no longer spam?
You can't define a standard for illegal behavior that encompasses most of what the medium is designed to do.
> You're making a distinction that doesn't work. At what point does an email become "tailored"? Five words? Ten? If someone sends you an unsolicited sales pitch that is mostly identical to the one they're sending to five hundred other people, but uses your name and adds a sentence saying that they "admire the work you've done with $X", is it no longer spam?
Trying to measure this by word count is completely socially inept. It's not about word count, it's about the fact that they don't actually give a crap about me or my goals: they're just trying to sell me their product. I don't care if 100% of the words in the message are hand-crafted to appeal to me: if they're just trying to convert me as a revenue stream instead of actually trying to address me as a person, I don't want to hear from them, even once.
Also, your example falls under the Compliant class of emails under the act.
Edit: (since I can't reply to a poster from whom I received a down vote)
I agree, the act is too narrow in my opinion. I don't equate clicking "spam" with compliance with the law. I was simply stating that the parent post's "slippery slope" assertion wasn't accurate in this case.
Your post reads like a satire of SV mindset - overly literal, overly self-assured, totally ignorant of how the world outside of a logic system actually works, and consequently choosing the libertarian or technoanarchist "throw it all out" approach.
Ha! I'm neither a libertarian nor a technoanarchist -- in fact, I'm frequently arguing with those types on HN. But thanks for the laugh.
Laws have room for interpretation, but again, they can't be written in a way that includes legitimate uses as illegal behavior, or the law is worse than useless. Define a rule that says (essentially) "you know spam when you see it", and you end up where pornography is: email marketing will be legal, with random, ineffective, arbitrary restrictions that make business within the domain unseemly and difficult.
Said another way: criminalize unsolicited email and only criminals will send emails.
Well, that’s true — I don’t want all unsolicited email to be banned — although the types of unsolicited mail I want are narrow enough to almost be defined (and thus solicited).
There is perhaps a distinction that could go really far, though: unsolicited email from and on behalf of an individual, not a company, legal entity, or service provider, is 1000× more likely to be acceptable than the latter!
> that encompasses most of what the medium is designed to do.
What? That's wrong. UBE has always been hated, ever since the Project Gutenberg guy tried to email the US constitution to everyone who had an email address.
actually, it does work. a template is a pretty clear concept, a fill-in-the-blanks form that is sent out en masse. an email becomes a "template" when it is used as a template.
My theoretical marketer isn't using a template! He's writing a customized sentence or two specific to every recipient. And if that isn't enough, he's using a statistical model to change the wording of the offer, and select the content of the paragraphs, images, etc. based on your location, age and industry. The email is specific to you in every way -- it's just mostly generated by a machine.
> Email providers are so scared of this that many officially require double-opt-in procedures in order to open an account
"Double opt in" is a flag-phrase that makes you sound like a spammer. If you want to avoid sounding like a spammer you should probably use the phrase "confirmed opt-in" instead.
Confirmed opt in is vital for unsolicited bulk email.
The example you give - unsolicited email, sent to a single person is not spam. As soon as it's sent to more than one person it's spam. Avoid being labeled as a spammer by asking people to opt in, and confirming their opt-in.
I try to unsub first, because if I opted in they don't deserve to be marked as spam. But if your unsub method doesn't work. You are 100% going to get on every spam list I can put you on.
The problem is the law doesn't specify how well the unsubscribe (opt-outs) have to work.
You could literally leave unsubscribe instructions to snail mail your email address to some location, and as long as you stopped emailing them 10 days after getting the mail you're okay.
"You can’t ... make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request." [1]
I can see how people get annoyed (I do), but I think this strategy is harmful to some companies. For example, I work for a web company that sends out a LOT of emails as reminders for events. ISPs (or some other web intermediary, I'm not sure) have rankings based on your likelihood to spam. A lot of spammy emails are already caught in the filter, and either don't go through or go to your spam folder. We work pretty hard to clear up misunderstandings that could harm our email rating so that users don't miss important events.
That all being said, reporting spam instead of unsubscribe could hurt their email rankings in the future. Obviously I'm not talking about VIAGRA6969.NZ, but avoid the spam button if the company is respectable at all.
There are a number of modern-day services that perform a similar function. Spamhaus is probably the most famous. Looking at the wikipedia entry, it looks like SPEWS failed because their whitelist process was not good (and the DoS attacks).
Consider it a message from your customers that you're doing email incorrectly. If your service is indistinguishable to customers from an unsolicited bulk commercial email sender, you've doubtless got some tweaks to make to improve that distinction.
Bye bye Web Summit... after unsubscribing from your email list several times I get sent your emails time and time again, and your affiliate events, and your newsless announcements, etc. Thank you Google.
What I don't understand (possibly noob question), is the scenario where I get spam and I click on "Report spam" to be prompted with "Unsubscribe and report spam".
I'd never subscribed to it so why am I asked whether I would like to "Unsubscribe". Is it that the spammers got hold of my email from somewhere and "Subscribed" me automatically?
Shouldn't "Report spam" implicitly imply that it's not a subscription?
People use the Report Spam button on things that they explicitly signed up for all the time, and Gmail has adjusted its behavior to match how users use it rather than try to persuade them to instead do the right thing.
A checkbox hidden somewhere that's enabled by default doesn't mean that "I have subscribed" to the mailing list, both in the common sense and also is prohibited in many legal jurisdictions (not USA, AFAIK), leaving a default checkbox simply doesn't count as obtaining consent, it is a well known 'dark UI pattern' that even the consumer protection laws have understood and explicitly implemented.
Such messages are just another kind of spam, and the right thing to prevent this, naturally, is to block the sender as a spammer. Underneath there is somewhat proper a mailing list that supports unsubscription, so an unsubscribe message can and should also be sent, but it doesn't change the fact that all the subscribers were added without their informed consent - if you built a system with opt-in by default, then you yourself built a system where it is impossible to say that you actually want to subscribe, the only provided checkbox then represents a choice between the default (no informed consent) and an explicit refusal of consent.
I'm the author of a product and in some situation I have subscribed former users to a one-off email. It's gray area since it was to notify them about a major release/change, it was written in my T&C and sign up form, but honestly it would feel legitimate if they marked my email as undesired/spam.
Out of 900 recipients, 1 marked it as spam, 18 unsubscribed. I believe people are very tolerant and they could use "spam & blame" a lot more.
I think your situation is different; you're not subscribing them to a newsletter. Your communication is reasonable for a typical business relationship. (and is protected under CAN-SPAM)
That's right. All too often I've subscribed to a mailing list expecting the odd email now and again only to suffer a deluge of totally irrelevant and annoying 'updates' on an almost daily basis.
The worst offenders also make it difficult to unsubscribe. Hence, the report spam option.
Yes. I end up with loads of useful emails in the Spam folder. Mostly it's stuff like shipping and billing notifications. I check the Spam folder daily, now, since so much useful mail ends up there.
The right thing is to not register me to these spam mailing lists in the first place. I did not register, ergo they are spam, and should be blocked from spamming other people. "Report spam" is exactly the correct behavior I intended when I clicked on it.
I'd assume so. The CAN-SPAM[0] act mandates that the unsubscribe link must not contain any authorization, e.g., you click the link and you're immediately unsubscribed. This is just trading a click in one location for a click in another, but it's a neat feature to not search through the entire email to try to find the unsubscribe link.
CAN-SPAM does not actually require one-click unsubscribe, but many senders include it anyway.
From the primary source: "Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice [to opt-out] to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. "
You're both kind of right. A one-click unsubscribe is not required, but if you do use a web link for unsubscribe, the form can't require the user to enter any information beyond their email address. (Unsubscribe forms that require you to login are probably violating this law.)
"Reply with the word REMOVE in the subject" is also a CAN-SPAM complaint unsubscribe method, though.
It's actually surprisingly difficult to find original, authoritative sources on what the law requires. You linked to the full text of the bill Congress passed, but that left all the implementation details up to the FTC. The rule I'm talking about was not in the original bill or in the original set of FTC rules, but was added later by the FTC in 2008.
From 16 CFR 316.5:
> Neither a sender nor any person act-
> ing on behalf of a sender may require
> that any recipient pay any fee, provide
> any information other than the recipi-
> ent’s electronic mail address and opt-
> out preferences, or take any other
> steps except sending a reply electronic
> mail message or visiting a single Inter-
> net Web page, in order to [...]
It's worth noting on top of what others have said, Gmail (and assume most others too) will only display the unsubscribe button from whitelisted mail servers, as far as I'm aware.
The reasoning being that it could be used by spammers to confirm an email address is real/valid after a user attempts to unsubscribe at which point they could sign them up to more spam. So don't expect your own emails to show the button by just adding the List-Unsubscribe header, unless you're using something like Amazon SES.
That's where it started. Open a marketing message, look at the from line. If they're implementing it, you'll see "Marketer name" <marketer@emailaddress.com> Unsubscribe
This will actually be a useful feature for me. I consistently get e-mails from a procurement business somewhere half-way across the world that somehow thinks that my gmail address is that of one of their employees. I routinely get CC'd on e-mails containing invoices, BOMs, customer inquiries etc. I've tried reporting as spam, phishing, and even replying to all on message that includes customers of the business to say "I'm not who you think I am and you probably don't want strangers seeing these e-mails", all to no avail and these messages just keep ending up in my inbox. They're not always from the same person (it's a mid-sized company with varied customers).
Now I can just block them. I guess I could have used filters to do that, but this seems more convenient.
It's definitely more convenient. That's the whole point of the feature. If anyone says this feature isn't a big deal because you can just make a filter, you're wrong. This isn't a technical feature, it's a UX feature. And having good UX makes a technical feature worth usable.
Yeah, the filter config for GMail is very full-featured. Like there are a dozen actions you can take on a mail, all listed on a single popup. Makes sense to provide an easier path.
Hope this makes its way into the Inbox app as well. That app was announced with great fanfare, but it is still missing some key features (such as composing an email to a group) that are present in the regular app.
I would be really happy if the Inbox application had multiple accounts since I also use Fastmail and yet another account for work. But I guess the "postpone" feature would be impossible to have without access to the other servers.
Speaking of spam, the wedding industry is the worst offender I've ever seen; worse than porn websites. I've had my email address web spider-able for many years, but never seen as much spam as I have while planning a wedding. These venues and vendors take your information and sell it 2 seconds later to anyone and everyone. One venue, for example, I emailed to set up a visit and meeting. This wasn't some web form, it was me emailing them directly. Suddenly I'm subscribed to their newsletter. That was quite novel; they now rot in my spam folder.
Beyond that, after all this contact with venues, vendors, and bridal shows I'm now being bombarded with email spam, text spam, and worst of all phone calls from scam artists. The last one in particular is disturbing and makes it clear that these wedding related companies are selling information like there's no tomorrow. Disgusting.
I used a spam-only email and a google voice number to sign up for all my wedding planning-related needs. It would be unbearable otherwise. It's been two years and I still get spam _every day_ despite unsubscribing (and when available, reporting them as unsolicited). Sadly I wish I could do the same for facebook - I still get wedding planning and egg donation ads.
I think a close second place goes to real estate agents. I'll inquire about something once and I end up with newsletters about seminars and houses I don't care for.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've gotten any spam from porn websites I've signed up for, at least...
In a similar vein, but with physical mail, I made a donation to the local PBS TV station years ago during one of their fundraisers. They sent me a postcard with my name misspelled in a way I had never seen before. I then received solicitation mails from several other charities with the same misspelling. Nothing says "thank you for your donation" like being sold out for a few extra dollars. I never donated to them again.
Did you happen to create an account at TheKnot.com? We used dedicated email addresses for our wedding because I anticipated this, along with a "+theknot" modifier on the address, and holy crap did that inbox blow up with everyone they sold it to.
As someone who sends email newsletters, I would definitely prefer that too. I don't want to send messages to people who don't want them or aren't going to read them.
You could mailbomb someone by getting spam sent with their address as a from address. Then they'd be hellbanned from the internet and mailbombed at the same time. This could become a problem.
How is it blocking the person, when email from the person goes directly to spam? Isn't it same as marking the email from that person as spam or creating a filter to move to spam folder.
A bit unrelated, but Google and other companies have been using a lot more gifs in blog posts lately. I find my eyes have a harder time keeping my position in the text, and I keep losing my place/getting distracted. Any others feel the same way?
Presumably the advantage of this over a standard filter is that blocking (hopefully!) checks SPF/DKIM and verifies that the person being blocked is actually the sender of the email. Simply blocking a From-address would not be effective.
I am trying to solve a similar problem but offering unlimited email addresses, you can block any of your address, forward some of them to your regular email, visualize all (or just some) of the addresses in the same page as they were the same address and eliminate an address so that email is undeliverable.
We are in pre-beta, but if you leave your email (of course I won't spam) I will keep you up to date and I will ask your opinion :)
This just seems to be the same as creating a filter. What would be really cool would be if it bounced messages from people you "blocked"... that would be something!
This looks great! I'd really love to see Google and Microsoft stop people from registering a new account to send spam to my accounts. If my humble Postfix/Spamassassin configuration can correctly identify them as spam; I'd expect Google and Microsoft to be able to do the same and stop those messages before they are sent, particularly when they have virus document attachments. I just got another one yesterday.
One would imagine that when google receives enough block and/or unsubscribe clicks from their users that they would eventually ban that sender from contacting any gmail addresses in the future.
I deleted my linkedin account and recreated it using an email address I use for catching spam. Haven't had any emails from them since in my real inbox.
(What I'm writing applies to individuals, not mailing lists.)
I think a bounce would be preferable! Why waste someone's time?
I think it should only hell-ban via a special checkmark. By default it should cause a bounce saying that this person is not receiving email from that address. Then neither sender nor recipient have their time wasted going forward.
I mean for the 0.01% of cases where someone would literally create a new address just to continue harrassing you, yeah, you could then hellban their second address.
Why should we the general public worry about being 'fair' to spammers?
It's like the whole ad block thing. Now people have the power to do something about it they are asked to be 'reasonable' and won't somebody please think of the advertisers?
Nope. They had their chance to be fair with us. Techies have always been able to block such stuff but now it's seeping into the normal users ability/ ux upgrades hide complexity of doing so.
I feel as sorry for the spammers and ad trackers as I did for Borders when Amazon came along. Not at all.
It's nice to have a one-click button for it, but this was already available by configuring a filter. You just need to select all emails from a particular address and then choose to always mark them as spam or send them directly into the trash. From the headline I was thinking that they changed it so that you could keep email from an address from ever being delivered to your account in any form.