Your definition of spam is different than most people's. Yours is closer to the legal definition in the can-spam act, and other laws/regulations. But popular usage of the word doesn't _have_ to conform to your narrower definition.

That conflicting definition is why the people receiving your email marketing get so mad at you. They would rather have not given you their email at all, but they have to, and they don't want emails from you, but they get them anyway. They don't click your link to unsubscribe because they don't think it would work, and probably just make things worse. So they mark your email as spam, send it to their junk folder, and the returns on your email continue declining, and eventually the mail services start blacklisting you.

> It isn't spam because you don't want it.

It isn’t not spam because you want to send it.

You’re departing substantially from both the historical and commonly understood, contemporary definition of spam.

I see little historical precedent or common understanding for the HN definition of 'email I'd rather not have in my inbox' equating to 'spam'.

> I see little historical precedent or common understanding for the HN definition of 'email I'd rather not have in my inbox' equating to 'spam'.

Man, oh, man, you're funny. Even more so as it is apparently unintentional and you're being totally serious.

To the rest of the world, i.e. everyone who isn't a spammer, 'email I'd rather not have in my inbox' is and has always been the exact definition of 'spam'.

HTH!

This is the subject line of an email in my inbox right now. Sure you could say the sender allows me to opt out but I shouldn't have to opt out. This isn't legally spam but I want to know what you would call this unsolicited, non-transactional commercial email.

» Your Prime Membership: {{first name}} {{last name}}, discover the latest in deals and entertainment included with Prime

>I want to know what you would call this unsolicited, non-transactional commercial email.

Commercial email, differentiated from spam in that you have a commercial relationship with Amazon that you initiated and agreed to (i.e. solicited), and as such, they are allowed to market to you until such time as you ask them to stop.

I can see my opinion on this matter isn't a common one on HN.

> I can see my opinion on this matter isn't a common one on HN.

Your opinion isn’t common among anyone other than marketers trying to justify sending spam.

..And people who spend a lot of time fighting actual spam, as in, actual unsolicited junk email, who have to deal with false positives from uninformed users who think the 'report spam' button is the appropriate response to them getting an Amazon email they don't like.

I'm disappointed to see that attitude here.

In practice, there is little difference between "junk email" which I assume you mean scams/phishing/pills/viagra/etc adverts and that Amazon email. Both take space in your inbox, may send you a notification and require time and brain power to deal with. Whether the latter example may comply with some jurisdiction's definition of "spam" is irrelevant.

The "mark as spam" button gives users the ability to keep their inbox clean and you shouldn't be faulting them for using it.

Not to mention, even if we agree for a minute that the report spam button should only be used for emails that conform to the legal definition of spam, which law should we be following? The US' definition of spam is much more liberal than the EU GDPR's one for example.

> actual spam, as in, actual unsolicited junk email

solicit, v 1. To ask from with earnestness

unsolicited, adj 1. not asked for

Your justifications hinge entirely on a very unusual and rather tortured definition of “solicit”.

I'm disappointed to see spamming apologia here.

Did I sign up for a mailing list?

Yes - not spam

No - spam.

Creating an account with a company is not signing up for mailing lists unless there's a choice presented. Yeah, you can hide consent in the ToS that nobody reads, but that's not asking for permission.

It is the exact correct button for that kind of shit, and it sounds like you need to reevaluate what it is you're trying to optimize for.

> false positives

It's not a false positive. The filter needs to be tuned to what your users think is spam, that is what spam filters are for. You are not the gatekeeper of what other people are allowed to think is spam.

Ok, let's use "spam email" for what you consider spam and add a new category for unsolicited trash from known senders, e.g. "trash email".

> you have a commercial relationship with Amazon that you initiated and agreed to (i.e. solicited), and as such, they are allowed to market to you

That's not what that word means. I didn't solicit marketing emails; the only emails I asked for were the bare minimum to open an account and anything needed for orders that I initiated.

you do know, another name for spam is unsolicited commercial email (UCE), right? That is exactly what that crap is, since a) the person didn't want it (unsolicited), b) its relating to commerce, and c) its an email.

Any email I didn’t request or expect as part of a transaction (shipping update email) is spam as far as I’m concerned. I’m not concerned with any other definition other than my own. I will report every unsolicited marketing email as spam to my email provider. If the company that sent it wants to dispute that is between them and the provider. I don’t care what happens after I report and block the address. I don’t care if it takes “up to ten business days” to remove me from the marketing email list. That’s not my problem, I told you now I unsubscribed now and as far as I’m concerned any email I receive after that is spam.

I’m just a lowly user. Reporting it as spam is the only recourse I have.

Thanks to years of abuse of my email address by marketers I am all out of fucks to give.

It's actually very dependent on the country and jurisdiction.

Some EU countries require that you offer a simple and effective option to opt-out when gathering the contact details. Depending on the content, that can be a required to be an opt-in toggle.

It's not enough to offer users a way to unsubscribe once you've already started spamming them, there should be a way to not have the first spammy newsletter/newsletter group.

I'm curious - I see on your profile that you're a DevOps engineer presumably using a lot of online services on a daily basis, so what approach do you use to deal with email that would justify your opinion here?

Do you just let it fill up your inbox and essentially make it unusable as it's saturated with marketing spam? Do you read every single incoming email (if so how do you find time and how do you justify spending that time for this instead of other, more productive/fulfilling endeavors)? Do you have some magical, bulletproof AI that can classify and hide these marketing emails with 100% accuracy? Do you outsource the management of your inbox to someone else and if so how do you justify paying for that?

>so what approach do you use to deal with email that would justify your opinion here?

When I get email I don't want from a company I have an account with, I scroll to the bottom and click 'unsubscribe'. I then don't get anymore of those kinds of emails.

What I absolutely do not do is throw a hissy fit and click 'report spam' (which not fucks up my own bayes classifiers and makes false positives more likely, but sends harmful false reports to antispam orgs).

Seems to work quite well. Certainly well enough that I can't comprehend the level of snark and vitriol received here.

So you're accepting that for every company you sign up for you should expect at least one spam that requires time & attention to deal with (some may require login, etc)? Fair enough but I disagree that this is something we should all be accepting just for the benefit of a minority that happens to work in marketing.

> of those kinds of emails [emphasis mine]

Also keep in mind that scummy companies have caught on to that and now have dozens of different categories of marketing emails and unsubscribing merely unsubscribes you from one of them.

What I "accept" is that getting an email I'd rather not have gotten is not a day-ruining event worth rudely snarking at strangers on the internet for, and the level of entitled rage and piling on generated in response to a calmly stated ask (let's save 'spam' for things that actually meet an objective, commonly-accepted standard used by most groups that actually try to stop it) is ridiculous.

In a way you're perfectly correct: You're only wrong in the tiny detail that you think it's your narrowly legalistic definition that is the objective, commonly-accepted standard one. It isn't. (BTW, how did the fact that nobody else here accepts it not tip you off that it's not commonly-accepted?)

But, sure, say we go with your wishes and, as someone else suggested, call your spam something else than "spam" -- let's go with their suggestion and call it "trash email". Then the category -- or, now, categories -- of stuff that we want to get rid of from our inboxes become, in stead of just "spam", the more cumbersome "spam and trash email".

I'm sure you see the problem that immediately rears its ugly head: Language is lazy. "Spam and trash email" will in daily speech, inevitably, shortly become... "Spam". You may try to resist that, and as a longtime linguistic prescriptivist I extend you my sympathies... (But, psst, spoiler alert: This quixotic struggle is doomed to fail.)

But, anyway, you are of course perfectly free to keep campaigning for your cause. Only, in the name of all that is decent, be honest about it and call it for what it is: You're not defending spam, "only" trash.

Maybe after a while you'll realise why the rest of the world sees no difference in your distinction.

> let's save 'spam' for things that actually meet an objective, commonly-accepted standard used by most groups that actually try to stop it

Your definition is based on what’s legal under the “established business relationship” exemption in the CAN-SPAM act, not any “commonly-accepted objective standard” of what spam is.

Spam fighting existed long before a 2003 US law. RBLs came into being in 1997, Spamhaus in 1998. You'll note precisely none of these organizations (in any country) blacklisting Amazon, or any other company, because they send marketing emails to their existing customers.

> Spam fighting existed long before a 2003 US law.

So then it wasn't originally defined as per your preferred legal wording, now was it?

> RBLs came into being in 1997, Spamhaus in 1998.

And did they coin the expression, or was the concept itself around long before that...? (A: AFAIK, at least a decade earlier.)

> You'll note precisely none of these organizations (in any country) blacklisting Amazon, or any other company, because they send marketing emails to their existing customers.

Ah. So it's not actually the legal definition that is important, but the corporate one. OK, gotcha, that is of course so much better. (Blindingly obvious: /s)

[Edit: Added missing quote marker > ]

I have had enough experience with unsubscribe on spam that I have to wonder what your figures are for "working well enough". They don't work enough for me. It is also a well-known assumption that using unsubscribe on a bit of spam only confirms that the sender has found a working address and those sell for more on the spammer's email address market.

I also don't understand why "marketers" want to put stuff in my email inbox or anything else I use to receive real communications that I just don't want.

If people dislike receiving that email so much that they report it as spam, it's spam.

Maybe if enough scummy companies have to mess about getting de-blacklisted, they might reevaluate whether their emails serve their customers, themselves, or, more likely, neither the company nor the customer but rather someone in between who is using some artificial metric (maybe "clients reached", "tracking pixels delivered", whatever) to angle for a pay rise.

Unsolicited email from people and businesses you don't know is spam - and deserved to be flagged as such.

If only all companies actually had an unsubscribe link in their emails…

Nope. In the UK and EU (and probably other places!) you can’t send someone email marketing unless they explicitly opt in (i.e. no pre-ticked boxes either) [1].

Also, it is presicely spam because I don’t want it, whether you have a right or even obligation to send it or not.

[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Well, technically you can, because the government agencies doing the enforcement are systematically understaffed.