Or you get one of those mail saying "We are removing you from the list because you don't read our newsletter", often without offering any other confirmation signal. Basically they says "Let us track you or you are out of this list".

And this is also the result of marketing people who look at ways to increase the "good numbers", more likely to show to their bosses. They don't actually care if you read or enjoy their content, you are either one of the users who increase their opening and click rates, or you're a useless burden to them.

So my reward for protecting my electronic privacy is to have my privacy violated through the USPS.

You think the USPS is reading your credit card statements?

Leaving people in the dark about this sort of requirement should be considered an anti-pattern.

Unspoken assumptions are always going to be wrong for some people.

When unsubscribing, users are very sensitive to any subsequent emails (just read the other comments in this thread). Sending an email to confirm their unsubscription might annoy a lot of the users, or will make them doubt that you're above board ("legit" newsletters boast about not sending any emails after unsubscribing, so this is a little red flag) - they will then flag that email as spam, and then we're back at square one.

They also get annoyed when you ask them to confirm that they still want to read the emails.

And Gmail will flag you if you keep sending the emails when they're not opening the emails.

I think there really is no good solution here.

Overeagerly classifying legitimate email that someone subscribed to as spam is no better than classifying spam as legitimate. Especially on a system like GMail where one person's incorrect classification would lead to other people not receiving their subscriptions in their normal mailbox.

But that is not how it currently works.

Is there a reliable way to tell if an account is forwarding to Gmail? That way, you could reserve your spammer tools (not judging you for using them) for gmail users, and treat the rest of your subscribers with the respect you clearly intended.

The reason "You haven't loaded images for n months" is used as a signal is that there's a cost in sending unwanted email to people, and there's often no other way to know if you're wanted or not.

I clearly expressed interest in your newsletter by confirming the double opt-in.

It's also ok if I open your newsletter only once in a while, I may be busy, or I only want to read your content when its title click something in me.

The most successful newsletters respect this and did so for so many years. They never messed up with my subscription. I will never mark them as spam because I trust them. And there is a clear unsubscribe link in every one of them that I can click if I change my mind.

This is nothing new, Permission Marketing from Seth Godin is what, more than 20 years old now?

Instead, automation looks always fun and clever, until your growth-hack goes wrong.

Newer newsletters don't have that reputation, so they are more heavily penalized for low open rate or higher spam flag rate. Thus, they need to react more quickly to users invisible actions or risk damaging their reputation. I don't think this is a growth hack, I think this is a necessary action as a new entrant in a very unforgiving space - see some stories upthread from legitimate newsletters.

While your actions are invisible to the sender, they are _not_ invisible to your email provider, and ultimately they are the ones who make reputation decisions that can destroy a newsletter.

"We found we can increase the number of people subbing for the newsletter by skipping double opt in"

"Why are we getting so many spam flags?"

Because the increase you gained was all the people who didn't want it, cosmic brain. The people who wanted it already had it.

They may well consider this email to be an annoyance, but I think that's better than making an assumption, taking an action and leaving users in the dark. Some will prefer that, but some will be confused about why your service isn't working for them.

Seems like nothing of value would be lost?

> They don't actually care if you read or enjoy their content, you are either one of the users who increase their opening and click rates, or you're a useless burden to them.

Confirms that indeed nothing of value would be lost. It seems like a win-win situation, spam-letters you wouldn't want to read anyway eventually remove you off their spam list because they can't stalk you.

That would depend on the newsletter. Some newsletter provide lots of value for those wanting to keep up to date with minimum effort.

It could also be a newsletter you need to monitor for work purposes.

> They don't actually care if you read or enjoy their content, you are either one of the users who increase their opening and click rates, or you're a useless burden to them.

No they care more that you don't reduce their deliverability rate and that is affected by email service providers deciding if you're not opening the email you're not interested, not reading and enjoying the content and therefore and don't want the content.

A lot of value could be lost. There are one or two newsletters I get by email which I read frequently and may contain extremely valuable information (i.e. could result in a significant sale). It could easily be a pretty significant loss to the company (and me) if they stopped sending them.

Although I will give you that the vast majority of auto-removals have been beneficial for me.

In my experience, that's not what happens. My most recent experience with this was when I had gotten about half way through filling out my info for a service, I was sent an email with a price list, I opened it, looked at the email and decided to wait and compare prices with another provider.

Then the emails started.

'Oh hey we noticed you never finished your registration. I assure you our prices are the lowest anywhere'

Had opened the email but never answered it.

Get another email.

'Hey this is so and so, company president or whatever...if you need any more information, about blah blah blah, don't hesitate to send an email'

So I did...I told them I don't appreciate being spammed because I hadn't finished filling out a web form and i'd like them to stop.

Surprisingly, I got an email back from president dude or whatever apologizing and promising to remove me from the email list.

Yeah...right..

A day later...another email. So I blocked them as spam. I still get spam from them.

If I want to politely unsubscribe from a newsletter I have to: switch from the keyboard to the mouse, hunt for the link in the email and click it, switch contexts to the browser tab it opens, hunt for the primary action on the page, figure out whether that action will confirm the unsubscribe, or whether clicking the button will sneakily re-subscribe me, and then close the tab.

On the other hand, if I report it as spam, I just press "!" one time and (in theory) I'll never see its ilk again.

Reporting something as spam is such a clean experience that I'm trained to use it for things it wasn't meant for, like unsubscribing from a legitimate newsletter. I suspect that this is true for other users as well!

The vast majority of "newsletters" I get today are from companies that assume that I want to keep hearing from them just because I once did a one-time transaction with them. And no, it's not because I forgot to uncheck the "I want to receive blah blah blah" checkbox. I'm careful to opt out whenever there's an option for that.

I don't know about other people, but I call that stuff spam. Just because it isn't an e-mail from someone who got my address from a dump and decided to cold-mail me with their crap (or phishing or other scams), doesn't mean it's not unsolicited e-mail, i.e. spam.

Maybe things have changed over the years and I just wasn't paying attention, but I've trained myself not to press "unsubscribe" on something I didn't explicitly opt in to receive.

Spam is for any kind of email I haven't opted in to receiving. That includes mail from organizations I have never requested contact with, as well as any emails I get as a result of UX dark patterns. I try to opt out, but some of them sneak past, and I don't feel bad dinging it as spam. That's the risk you take with opt-out mailing lists.

Another is if you get signed up for multiple different streams of messages ("What's New!", "Tips to Get the Most out of X", "Company Communications", "Coupons", etc.) just by signing up for an account (and, as you point out, not actually opting in for any of them explicitly). Since Gmail does not always flag all of these different things as spam, it can be more efficient to go to the "unsubscribe" page and uncheck each of these streams yourself.

The only scenario I can think of is when people didn't intentionally subscribe or were coerced into subscribing and those newsletters can go to hell and fully deserve to be marked as spam.

Then they will go into their email client and click the spam button on both of the emails that I sent them. The confirmation email, and also the test email.

Even though they requested these emails. Even though both emails have an unsubscribe header and link which takes them to a place where they can opt-out in perpetuity from receiving any further email from me.

I know this, because I get feedback loop emails when people do it.

This happens regularly.

They then told their email provider that the email they requested was spam.

I've considered putting up a page with a list of these peoples email addresses, but I feel like it would end up causing me more problems than it's worth.

[edit] There should be a system where I can prove to an email provider that I was in fact given permission to send to an address (for a period of time, and/or for a specific quantity of messages). If there was a standard email header where you could stick a callback URL like:

  Request-Permission: url=https://www.example.com/callback period=1D count=10

Once pressed, it would replace the “spam” UI element with “unsubscribe”.

Yes. It’s clear that you have no intention to reach them afterwards. But to them it is not so clear, and they mark these innocent letters as spam preventively, out of habit, cause other sites committed abuse in the past and they don’t want to test yet another service’s good nature. Much easier to ban you forever and forget about that, even before you did something unexpected. I know it’s unfair, and I don’t act like that, but they can and some of them do. No time on their hands to differentiate. Modern email culture is rotten to the core and popular email services only cultivate that.

It's worse because the next time you receive a post from a newsletter you unsubscribed from, which may be weeks after you unsubscribed, you may actually start doubting if you did unsubscribe from them. There's no way to know, and this seeds some doubt in your mind.

So the next time you want to unsubscribe from a newsletter, legit or not, you're just going to press the spam button because there's no downside to you as the reader, but there is the upside that your mail client will from now on keep out the newsletter posts no matter if the newsletter would actually have unsubscribed you or not. Basically the "mark as spam" button is a 100%-unsubscribe button, while the unsubscribe button is a 95%-unsubscribe button.

I don't believe the situation of malicious actors in newsletters is actually as bad as some HN comments make it appear. Most legit use double opt-in and have good unsubscribe policies. As usual it's the few bad ones that ruin it for everyone.

I wish I had a 95% success rate when trying to unsubscribe...

I've given up on unsubscribing the 'right' way. Too much bs most of the time. It's now just mark as spam and move on.

I'm not sorry if I threw anyone's metrics off, they broke the law, they spammed me, it's on them.

I think this is received wisdom that might have been true 20 years ago, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

So for me, it does stand up to scrutiny, it still happens.

But I have scripts that count them, and when they get to five I then make the decision. Again, sometimes I continue simply to bin them, but sometimes I click the unsubscribe link. Mostly then they stop and there's no additional problem, but more than once that address has been used on other spam emails, and only after the unsubscribe.

Do you have actual evidence that it doesn't happen? You might, as others have, be arguing that it's not worth the spammers' effort. But setting up a script triggered by an unsubscribe is pretty trivial, and emails can then be sold at a premium, accompanied by a certificate of sorts that the address is valid.

So maybe it is worth their while.

I've noticed a few times that a company I have unsubscribed from years ago will suddenly start sending me mail again. Usually I'll just re-unsubscribe and they'll go away again.

I've also had it several times that I clicked on an Unsubscribe link and the resultant page indicated I had been removed from the list but I continued to receive mail noticeably past the date indicated ("it may take up to a week for your name to be removed, as some mail is queued in advance"). Conveniently, when I followed the link with my ad blocker disabled the request succeeded (without any change in appearance), but I actually stopped receiving their spam.

I can't say anything about email newsletters, because I don't subscribe to them.

You're assuming that they willingly signed up for it and weren't added to the list because of someone selling their data to another marketer, a dark UX pattern tricking them into signing up for the newsletter when they made a purchase, etc.

I tend to agree. Also, newsletter that try to track me with invisible pixels can go to hell, too.

Sometimes the spam/phishing line is hard to draw (especially without clicking a link and seeing what they try to make me do) and the 'unsubscribe' link is clearly just part of it, too.

Does anyone know what 'report phishing' actually does in Fastmail? I've had to use it a lot recently, and could easily create a rule for when I've been doing it, if only 'report phishing' was an available action. That it isn't makes me wonder if there's manual review or something so they don't want so much bulk? (And in that case probably also don't/want need my tens of ~duplicates a day.)

Yeah that's the better part of 95% of them for me.

100% of them for me because i don't want any stupid newsletters. Yes, all of them go into the spam folder.

For some business that I otherwise am a customer off i also forward their shit spam to their support and tell them to unsubscribe me, even if they have a link. For the simple reason that if they feel like they can waste my time with their shit, i'm gonna waste theirs too.

If you're running a legit newsletter that people want I can't imagine enough people would be marking it as spam for it to actually affect your reputation.

It is unfortunately not implemented by most email clients.

AFAIK, Gmail does as well.

Better email clients know to use the header, and e.g. gmail even asks about properly unsubscribing when marking a newsletter with that header as spam iirc.

Spam companies often use this to check if the email address they've targeted is real because they get callbacks from legitimate users. I've only seen one or two legitimate uses of the header as far as I can remember.

As if gmail ui wasn’t already obscure af. They could make “don’t want this anymore” button that uses unsubscribe header first and if it doesn’t work, mark it as spam automatically. Many shady practices would disappear at that same moment, but who cares when making six figures a year.

If only email could work as a modern instant messenger - no spam, reacting to explicit and well-defined user intents, allowing file transfer without limitations that render that function useless, and delivering messages in less than a second.

I'm surprised that people still press spam for a double opt-in mailinglist. Double opt-in is the right way to subscribe, click unsubscribe is the right way to unsubscribe.

People reporting that as spam should probably have their spam reports ranked as illegitimate.

However, plenty of mailinglists are spam. Sometimes I get newsletters in a language I don't even know. Maybe someone entered a wrong email somewhere and the list never verified that it's correct. Sometimes you subscribe to a bunch of spam if you forget to uncheck a checkbox somewhere. That stuff is not something the user explicitly asked for, and the user may have a hard time distinguishing it from spam or phishing, so I can understand reporting that as spam.

Can you give a source/reference for this? I'd like to understand it more.

I don't allow any remote content when I read emails, and I get quite a lot of regular newsletters. Why am I not being unsubscribed?

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en

CTRL-F "Send email to engaged users"

Some choice quotes:

- "Consider unsubscribing users who don’t read your messages."

- "Periodically send a confirmation message to users to make sure they still want to get your messages."

Also, as someone whose mail client doesn't load external resources for privacy reasons, I'd be annoyed if you unsubscribed me because you weren't tracking my reading. However, an occasional confirmation (say, once or twice a year) as they suggest would be just fine. You could even restrict those to just those subscribers who do not trigger the tracker.

Once you're hit with a ban, it's very hard if not impossible to recover.

If you've been at HN for a while, you must have noticed that every now and then there are stories from Google users being mistakenly banned from their account for violating some rule that they don't even explain to them. These events happen to mailing lists as well, but there's even less of a recourse for mailers when this happens. Considering all this, I'd rather err on the side of caution and implement most of recommendations by Google, than increase my risk of being marked a spammer, and risk losing the whole project.

> However, an occasional confirmation (say, once or twice a year) as they suggest would be just fine. You could even restrict those to just those subscribers who do not trigger the tracker.

What is fine to you, is annoying to others. Just read the other comments on this story, where people commonly complain about receiving an email asking to reconfirm their subscription.

It's not just tracking. I generally feel email is more useful with html on and pictures off. You automatically skip most colorful signatures , headers, legal whatever's ..., while still getting nice formatting

I was frustrated at some points when I was on my early day with my news letter and AWS SES. I don't know why people spend time to register for my news letter, after reading through the archive. Yet, they chooese to mark email as spam even though we explicitly have an unsubscribe link and require double opt-in.

For AWS SES, you have to maintain spam rate at <0.1%. And AWS has their own way to pick sample set of emails.

So yeah, it's really important to manually unsubscribe people that won't read email. Don't even attempt to make a final email to ask them if they want to be remove because you risks another "mark as spam" click.

Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean people intentionally avoid this because it leads to the advertisers marking that as "read" and therefore a live user?

Asking because I recently purged my old emails which had thousands of emails, they obviously never stopped sending even with zero interaction.

But my method was to click the unsubscribe link which I was afraid might give them more information about them and doing the opposite of what I wanted. I know some didn't even respect the unsubscribe, I took note of which ones I explicitly clicked and they're still sending spam to me.

My belief about people being weary of the unsubscribe button are elaborated on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164450

But I definitely don't click on unsubscribe buttons in unsolicited mail when I don't really know who it's from. It could be an attempt to identify a valid mailbox (and spam me more), or it could link to malware.

So yeah, rule number 1 of email protection should be: do not tell the scammer/spammer that you actually use this email address. In case of a doubt, click the "spam" button, block the address, but do not click "unsubscribe." Only click "unsubscribe" if you trust the sender, because once you have done it, your email address is suddenly worth a lot more, especially to bad actors.

It's a bit more complicated than that. There are many reasons why a pixel may not fire but the email is still read, and there are many ways pixels can record false positives.

Relying on email opens is really not a good measure of engagement.

Sadly, inbox placement is almost impossible to measure without email open tracking as feedback loops from gmail/hotmail/etc are just not good enough.

It's not, but it's what we have. It's a bit like how counting podcast listeners based off of downloads is a terrible system too but it's all they have to go on (I'm subbed to hundreds and don't listen to 99% of episodes).

You may have had this happen before and probably thought that was just a scammy way to get you to click a link, but in fact it's completely legit.

Clearly that would be worst possible practices.

I'm subscribed to some mailinglist that I don't actually read but would be upset if they auto-unsubscribed me, because if I'm ever interested, I want it to be there.

It doesn't mention pixels anywhere, though.

It does contain the line:

> "Consider unsubscribing users who don’t read your messages."

But that's only after lots of mention of opt-in and unsubscribe options. And ultimately, you can't really know whether users read your messages or not.

And personally, I still think it's a bad idea to automatically unsubscribe people who are interested in your newsletter merely because they're not loading images. At the very least, make it very explicit that you're going to do this, and maybe give them the option to turn the auto-unsubscribe off.

Using a tracking pixel isn't perfect, but like what peter said in another comment somewhere here, it's the best we've got. If you want to implement Gmail's (and other ISPs) best practices, then you need to do tracking of engagement. Just because you don't like it, does not mean that is not considered best practice. Just because it won't be 100% perfect, does not mean it's not considered best practice.

You may disagree that it should happen, but you cannot factually say it is not a best practice.

(Edit: I just read both Thunderbird and Protonmail do this by default, so maybe I'm not too much of a minority?)

I'm always looking for the super hidden unsubscribe button. I don't move to spam. But sometimes I get mails without even subscribing, and that is far worse.

The only way that this justification makes sense to me is if you mail people that didn't explicitly subscribe to your newsletter in the first place. If that's the case, I think that the problem lies elsewhere.

An email is meant to be read, that's it. Any other interaction a user will have with it that is still under your concern is if they follow any links - I personally object even to that. Assuming to track anything besides people visiting your website from a newsletter link is an infringement of the unspoken contract between you and your subscribers.

I consume most of my email in plain text format. Like me there are others. Your solution is not working for us.

As a sender, it's impossible to get any specifics from Google as to when it happens. You can get a generalized spam report rate from them but that's about it.

These slackers are the worst. Not only they cause trouble to legit email newsletters, they also affect the subscribers who want to read the email. Every time I check my gmail spam folder, I'll find at least 2-3 legit newsletters classified as spam because "It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." At least gmail makes it easy to tell them apart from email marked as spam because they were deemed malicious.

Personally, I end up clicking spam on a lot of stuff - they get one chance at unsubscribe. If I get asked to log in, or it redirects to anything other than a confirmation page, then I mark it as spam and forget about it. I get too many misdirected emails to give it any more time than that (my email address is my name, many other people share that name, and a lot of them seem to think that they have that email address too).

How about measuring interaction as the user doing something like logging into your site, buying a product, posting a comment on your site, sending you an e-mail -- those are actual interactions. By not counting simply opening the e-mail as interaction, you can satisfy your worries about bothering people without spying on them. You can use the lack of logins or e-mails from the user as an indication of disinterest.

The profit incentive that's built-in via collection of user data makes any "it's for the user's best interest" argument questionable.

I don't necessarily like the model, but if this is your business model, then there's nothing else that can be measured to monitor ongoing success apart from:

- how many new users signed up

- how many existing users unsubscribed (or marked as spam)

It's a tough ask getting sponsors based on those two metrics alone.

For a while I couldn’t receive email notifications from Facebook because so many other gmail users marked them as spam, so no matter how many I unmarked, I was screaming in the wind.

Fair enough that other people don’t wanna deal with that crap, but it should still be my prerogative to receive them.

I first gave up, and later decided I didn’t care. But for a while I thought it was clever to have an immutable archive of Facebook interactions (those notifications used to include full text of posts you were tagged in or that was written on your wall as well as new messages)

I don't get it.

And this is an example of stopping tracking worsening the user experience because the tracking improved user experience by removing people who aren't interested in the list.

> And this is an example of worsening the user experience, where the previous comment is claiming that tracking improves it. There is absolutely no benefit to the user experience with the tracking here, only downsides; it is a punishment for disabling tracking. The only actual reason to track mail opens is pay-per-view advertising, everything to do with monetization and nothing to do with improving the UX.

No it's not it's all about deliverability. Literally, they get penalties in their deliverability if they keep emailing you stuff you're not interested in.

It's not a penalty if you choose to go againist the grain and suffer the negative effects. Stop blaming others for the negative effects of your choices.

Then it's exactly your job to figure out how to accomplish this in a less user hostile way.