I hate this, because it's made me cynical. I don't even try to un-subscribe from emails like this anymore, I just mark them as spam. And that hurts the good companies that do listen and unsubscribe you easily, because now they are being looked at as spammy.

If I didn't run my own mail systems, that's what I would do.

Instead, I just blacklist the sender's IP address. It's even nicer when the sender (e.g. LinkedIn) publishes TXT RRs for SPF in their DNS zone as it allows me to easily blacklist all of them.

Note that as more senders use mail service providers, comprehensive blocking of all SPF records may have considerable collateral damage.

Whether you consider this good or bad may vary: it means MSPs have a valid claim that senders exercise Good Citizen practices on all mailings, not just those circulating via the MSP.

Then there are the major players. Yahoo's been a freaking PITA for years on outbound spam (both spam and joe-job bounces), with no effective reporting mechanism. Gmail's been largely better IME, other providers vary.

Yep. Anything sent by Constant Contact or MailChimp is auto-junked for me. I never see it.

At least from a MailChimp perspective at least those emails all come with unsubscribe links and such in them and I have found MailChimp to actually honor those. It's the ones that aren't from MailChimp, et al that I think twice before clicking unsubscribe on because it could just be a ruse to prove its a live account.

That's the problem though: The bad players are hurting the good players. I don't unsubscribe from stuff using mailchimp, because I'm just not going to take the time to learn which systems are legit and will unsubscribe you, and which ones are shady.

So in this case, mailchimp is getting marked as spam, even though they are an honest player.

I think that's exactly the right thing to do. If someone wants to make use of your time and attention for their own advantage, they should ask for permission. Someone who does so without asking for permission first is exactly what spam filters are for. It's not my job to help them with finding people that want to read their advertisements.

That's valid, I'm sure I've done the same more times than I know. My general rule is if it's from a brand or site I know I've interacted with or generally recognize I'll spend two seconds to check the unsub options.

If the unsub requires me to log in first, I mark it spam instead. If the link looks fishy and/or I can't readily discern it's of any quality it's spam. If I have no clue why I could've gotten the message it gets flagged for sure.

Luckily for me I get very few emails per month that I don't know why I would've gotten them, so it isn't a painful exercise to give them a chance to not get flagged.

I use Unroll.me[0] to manage the messages I do want to get, but want to check on my own time and I don't want them sitting in my inbox. I'm sure there are other types of services, but I'm generally happy with what they do. They also can manage a lot of the opt-out features as well, not sure if it 'protects' me any more than doing it myself though.

[0] https://unroll.me

Requiring you to log in to unsubscribe is a violation of CAN-SPAM:

#6: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

If you report the spam to MailChimp, they will take action against the offender to defend themselves and their non-spam customers.

Mailchimp requires senders to have proof that you signed up, and my experience is that they are very responsive to inquiries disputing that the proof exists.

I own my domain so that I now give each website a different email alias. So that:

1. If I start receiving spam I know who leaked my address

2. If I can't switch off the spam hose, I just delete the alias, which severs any way this website can contact or bug me.

It should be generalised. All it requires is a sort of index to remember who was given what alias.

A similar thing happened to me the other day as well (oddly enough, also in Australia).

I was buying a ticket for a football game, but just to make sure there wasn't a better seat I clicked the back button on my browser to go back to looking at seats. Suddenly I saw that the same seat had gone up by 10% in price.

Anyway, I pressed the forward button to see if the new price would apply, but it didn't. So I somehow avoided paying an extra 10% because their confirmation page was cached, but not the seat selection page.

Always browse incognito when buying things like this, including flights.

Why? What does browsing incognito give you? Surely it doesn't give you cheaper flights. Rates are not raised because you've been browsing them for awhile

> Rates are not raised because you've been browsing them for awhile

That's exactly what they do. If you're browsing for plane tickets and you're a bit undecisive (like me), don't be surprised if the prices go up by 200% for that specific day you wanted to book. Going incognito and in some cases returning after a hour will bring the prices back down.

This persistent urban legend has been debunked.

What's really happening is that prices move around all the time.

Debunked by what exactly? Can you prove/guarantee it's not happening?

While I don't have any other evidence than my pretty specific anecdotal experience to prove it's true (in addition to what friends in the airline industry told me), it is common knowledge that price discrimination is a pretty fundamental aspect of airline pricing so this "myth" is not that inconceivable.

It's impossible to prove that this is impossible, because you can always claim that I wasn't targeted for some reason. I have however tested it myself several times and never found any difference when looking at the same site cookieless and cookied—at the exact same time.

That being said, a lot of people have done testing of this and found no evidence of repeated cookies specifically leading to higher prices. Here are some of the links I've found:

* http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/seaney/2013/0...

* http://blog.getinvisiblehand.com/2011/04/08/ryanair-manipula...

* http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/08/ask-lh-will-deleting-co...

I'm not disputing that price discrimination happens. Just that by far the biggest determinant of it is time, as airlines constantly publish and unpublish different fare buckets.

In fact, what I suspect is happening when people see lower fares is just caching. All OTAs heavily cache prices in search results and then only fetch the updated price once you drill into results. I could easily imagine a scenario where the prices has actually gone up, but users in incognito (who haven't drilled down yet) see the old, outdated price.

The notion of specific price discrimination on specific users by cookies doesn't make sense though. For one thing, I don't see how it could possibly work technically. Information on airline prices flows in direction—airlines are constantly telling aggregators the latest prices/fare buckets, which the aggregators then display to users. Aggregators don't make a request to the airline for pricing every time you search, so how would they even know to update your price based on previous activity?

Provide proof or it's just anecdotal.

I've done this with 2 browsers looking for a car on the same site and they will have different prices. I generally never log in on chrome anywhere and only use it for twitch so it was a lot cheaper than my firefox that's logged in everywhere. Like $150 on a $300 ticket.

I wonder if that was because they thought you had a nice car.

RyanAir in Europe is notorious for this. Cheap flights but expensive, unadvertised baggage fees.

My car is nothing special. They would claim that prices change due to other people booking while you're going through the process, but I don't believe that.

I was booking well in advance - more than a month, and I was using the site after midnight.

There should be regulation against changing a price that is advertised, at least lock it in for a minimum of 5 or 10 minutes of selecting the fare. Bumping the fare up at the last step only a couple of minutes later is highly suspicious.

Hahaha that's sadly hilarious.