Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.

Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.

It's probably people like you that misuse the spam button that caused Google to give more weight to other signals for tuning their spam classifier.

I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?

I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.

Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.

No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?

> When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?

Never because my grocery store isn't a website.

OK. When was the last time facebook emailed you to confirm that you liked a comment?

The last time I had Facebook emails before I marked Facebook as spam every action which somehow concerned me on Facebook resulted in me getting a email and consequently flooding my inbox. Admittantly this was a few years ago when I finaly had enough of it so they might of gotten better but at one point they did.

Yes, I picked facebook as an example specifically because of their reputation for emailing you about everything. But I think you'll find that they tend to email you when other people do something that, in some sense, concerns you, not when you do something. (Remember the ancestor comment defining "solicited email" as email that responds to an action you take.) "This person just liked your comment" emails are plausible. "You just liked this person's comment" emails are self-evidently absurd, but they fall perfectly within the (spurious) definition of "solicited" that nitrogen wants us to believe in.

My grocery store gives me a printed receipt when I pay for my groceries. And I don't ask them to do that--they just print one up and hand it to me.

Amazon can't give you a printed receipt because you are not there, physically. So they send you an email instead.

This is not that hard to understand.

Stores don't give you receipts for your benefit. They print receipts to make sure the cashier isn't dipping into the cash register.

Card processors require retailers to provide transaction receipts to cardholders.

Every time I order groceries. Then again my grocery store is online.

To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more.

(And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.)

Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.

This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help:

1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons.

2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to.

For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.