beware that Meta/FB and Tiktok scripts are among those that siphon off email data even before a web form is submitted

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/some-...

This is a good reminder to keep your hosts file updated to block at least some of these sites' attempts to take your data.

https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

> Email marketing in general blows my mind

My favorite thing is when the companies outsource the email marketing, so that it has absolutely zero relevance. I've been using the same online tax preparer for 10 years, and I've had exactly zero refunds, yet their emails during tax season always let me know that "my refund is waiting".

The point of email marketing is to hit the right targets. If they overspray and hit 100000 wrong targets.., oh well, they lost 3 cents. So this overspray isn’t a sign that they are dumb, but they are effective.

That's why the only email subscription service on my site is completely transparent and details exactly what we're storing, and it's impossible to click by accident. Everything I do for myself I try to build like a service I'd like to use myself. But the second managers or marketers are involved it's all out the window. I remember early in my career my boss had me add every email included in a TED booklet to their marketing email list. I told him that morality issues aside he could likely catch a fine for that, especially since the type of people listed in a TED booklet are likely more litigious than the average bear. Didn't care, wanted more eyes on the marketing.

> That's why the only email subscription service on my site is completely transparent

Sorry, but honestly speaking even checking your profile does not reveal what your web site is. Probably you are marketing person from your words, but that's not clear.

Hope this feedback helps!

That's intentional, I'm not trying to plug my website I was just talking about my approach in non-specific terms. I'm a dev.

I'm not a big fan of ipv6, but fan or not, I bet if all spammy mailchimp type provider IP ranges were confiscated and freed, we'd be in ipv4 land for another 20 years.

And as a second thought, the way China amd Russia are going, maybe we should just reclaim all their ipv4 addresses, and just give each country 1 IP, they can proxy through it on their end.

Then say goodbye to the internet and hello to a mesh of country-specific networks.

Finally, true decentralisation!

? That's my point, as this is China already, and Russia is not far behind.

We already have that. It’s just we are in denial as a society about it.

Globalization is over. The post Berlin wall fall consensus undermined and ruined.

The last to realize, loses.

The quickest way to achieve defeat is to convince yourself that you have already lost.

One address should be enough for everyone? Bill Gates just reached zen.

Mostly, it doesn’t even seem to matter whether you agree or not. Inevitably you end up receiving affiliate emails regardless.

This is why every company gets a different address for me. If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already).

This sometimes falls foul of spammers adding some random addresses of the form [email protected] or <commonname>@mycatchall.domain.tld into their lists, but that hasn't happened often enough to be a problem. That it isn't much of a problem surprises me a little, given how much <commonname>@domain.tld (no sub-domain) addresses are used this way. I have considered trying the pattern somename@<sub-domain-per-company>.domain.tld as an alternative if that becomes a problem, but before implementing that I need to change my email setup (doing that anyway soon as running Zimbra's OSS version is going to get more difficult next year) and maybe my DNS server of choice (if wildcard MX records are an issue, I've not looked into that).

Sometimes I get funny looks for addresses like this, especially as I usually work the company/other name in there somewhere. I had one website refuse to accept an address based on their name, which was a rad flag and I backed away from going any further into dealing with that organisation.

You can just use [id]-[sha1 hmac]@domain.tld

The id could be anything, and the SHA1 HMAC takes 32 characters in base32 (which is an email-address-safe encoding). Then just configure your spamfilter to reject any address where the HMAC doesn’t check out.

Of course, the drawback is that you’ll need a computer to generate a new address… At which point you may as well store an explicit whitelist of valid addresses.

You can do that from a phone app though, or even a static webpage that loads on phones. It doesn't have to be 32 characters either, putting ~4 characters is probably secure enough, unless a ton of people start using this exact scheme.

This is a great idea, I might implement it. The difficult part is hooking the validation in the mail server I guess.

I typically do it with

<emanynapmoc>@mydomain.tld

Spelling the company's name backwards makes it easy to match to a company for use by my own spam filter without setting off their pattern detectors.

> If junk starts coming in, that address is blocked, and I stop doing business with that company (if I haven't already).

AND CALL them, if possible: “I’ve received marketing emails from your company recently, how is this possible, I’ve never signed up, yaddayadda… “

Generate some cost on their side.

Support calls will probably cost you more than the company unless you value your time very little - most companis don't post numbers answered by anyone paid highly enough for this to have an impact. Instead, call them out publicly or mail/call a someone in a leadership position if you can find contact information.

You don't have to use the company name in the email address, just use a unique email. If you start getting spam on a certain email address, search your email archives to see what company was associated with that address to link it back to them.

Yeah my mortgage company sent me a letter saying to opt out of affiliate marketing Emails or snail mail I have to send them a letter requesting it. This was 4 months after they bought my mortgage so the most the letter woulda done is stop them after selling my info for 4 months.

I had a coworker who sent those letters as a side hustle. He had a few different ones and would send the letters certified mail. Companies are very poor at compliance, and certain violations allow you to sue the company.

Everything in that except the unspoken end point where I end up with money sounds awful