Yeah mess with your email provider by sending false reports, I'm sure they'll appreciate that (sometimes I wonder if spam is such a big issue in part because users report anything they don't want in their inbox, like a newsletter they previously signed up for, as spam or similar)
Either you're at a small ISP and paypal doesn't care about a handful of customers that need to dig an email out of the spam folder, or you're at a large one and it won't have an effect because nobody else is reporting it
This doesn't hurt paypal but might annoy a small email hoster that might have to clean up your mess.
People use Paypal because they can't get around it. If you want to hurt them, help reduce their market share. Complain to the support of the service where you needed paypal, asking for better payment options (cite articles like this or whatever). That's what I do anyway, and doubly so when I know the owner. That they need to also offer paypal to get more customers, sure that's their risk (I make sure they're aware of it), but at least offer legit payment options as well
There's a difference between messages nobody wants and messages that you don't want.
We've got problems with messages sent to literally millions of people: viagra spam, phishing scams, banking malware, you name it.
There isn't a problem with messages that you don't want to see in your inbox anymore but that are from a legit business where you can unsubscribe. Trying to unsubscribe from real spam just confirms that the email address is active and the message has been read, and now you'll just get more spam and your email address is more valuable. That's very distinct from a legitimate sender.
There's a clear distinction and I'm wondering if we'd have an easier time filtering out the actually bad stuff if people that think like you didn't muddle the data by marking normal email traffic as spam
Yes, this is a special situation with no real good options because paypal is behaving like its usual dickish self. I still don't think that it harms paypal or helps anyone to mark their email as spam. Best would be to create a rule to drop their incoming messages.
Or use GDPR or some other legal option if you have time to spare and want to cost them some time=money in dealing with your request.
Training a spam filter is not the same as creating a do-not-deliver rule for a given sender. Unless you manage to convince the filter that paypal is the same as a viagra scammer (good luck with that), you'd still get those messages from paypal.
Maybe some providers also denylist the sender-receiver pair when you click spam to combat this problem nowadays; back when I used public email services this was rarely the case. Nowadays I use a different system altogether so I don't know if this might now be common.
Either way, this is not what the spam button is for, but from this subthread I see that enough people on HN already don't understand how these systems work (and education is hard: people don't even read relevant oneliners pushed in their face at a relevant time, such as error messages), so I guess there's no hope for the general public altogether. I didn't know this is an entirely lost cause and is making me rethink about reporting spam on platforms like reddit. I guess they get so many false positives that I'm wasting my time reporting anything as spam ever.
Most of my email is on my own server, but in my experience (with gmail, etc.) marking a sender as spam will keep them out of my inbox going forward. I would personally filter the email, but for those who don't understand that process, marking as spam can be effective as well.
I mean, I agree that there are varying levels of legitimacy, but that's kind of baked into the system at this point and it doesn't help that plenty of spammers don't have legitimate unsubscribe buttons and sell your email to a chain of ever less legitimate players.
> There's a clear distinction and I'm wondering if we'd have an easier time filtering out the actually bad stuff if people that think like you didn't muddle the data by marking normal email traffic as spam
Something tells me that you missed most of the history of dealing with spam, because people used to be naive about this back in the day and spammers exploited the hell out of them by using unsubscribe to confirm that the email was live and similar tricks.
Unwanted is unwanted. It really does vary by person, that much is true, but even your viagra spam is wanted by some people. But the people sending it are very often also doing a lot of shady stuff like running botnets, so the technical measures to stop that look very different from, say, looking up the SPF record for Paypal:
So the short answer is no, people not wanting to get spammed by Paypal isn't likely to get you more viagra ads from botnets. Maybe, just maybe, it could create some small headache for Sendgrid (who is in Paypal's SPF, but is no small player), but I doubt it.
That aside, I think a few of them frequent HN and they can answer that one for themselves if they want to.
No. Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.
If you've used a service, even briefly, and willingly given them your email address, and then later get emails from them, that's not spam. Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing, but there is a way to unsubscribe.
> Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.
Can you provide a reference to that definition?
I have checked on merriam-webster, oxfordreference.com, oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com, and wikipedia. None of them include the "from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with" clause. Or even anything which could be read that way.
> Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing
Yes, super annoying. And also spam. If I didn't ask for it it is spam. If they trick you to "agree" to it (for example by having a checkbox where checking the box means you don't want to receive emails) without you realising, that is still spam.
> None of them include the "from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with" clause.
Spam is illegal, but I'm pretty sure none of the mentioned sources make the law about what is and isn't allowed to be sent. Maybe you can find the actual definition in the laws that apply in your jurisdiction.
The laws regarding spam are not the definition of "spam". Rather, the laws describe a subset of spam that can be clearly and definitively identified as "spam". It does not include cases that are just barely within a grey area, but which any reasonable person would label as "spam".
The law follows the existing understanding of what constitutes spam, just as it does for "murder", "theft", and a myriad of other cases. The law does not define these terms, only how they will be applied within the context of the legal system.
If an email address is provided for not-marketing purposes, and is used for sending marketing emails, that’s spam.
For example, I went to a mechanic, and provided my email address as a way to contact me. I started getting marketing emails from Sirius XM, despite never having interacted with them. Therefore, marked as spam. If Sirius doesn’t want their emails to be marked as spam, they shouldn’t be sending out spam.
Edit: Or, in the case of Walgreens, their "Unsubscribe" link reported that there was no subscription at the email address to which they had just sent an email. For that one, I did give a reply to let them know of the issue, and got no response. When the next one arrived from Walgreens a week later, that was reported as spam.
Do they now mark your address as "still active and being read" and send it more messages because it's now more valuable?
Or will you stop getting email from them?
That's the difference between things you should be marking as spam and things that annoy you but are legal and you'll just need to press unsubscribe on (and be careful with whom you give your data to). Write to your representative if you want the law changed on what's legal.
You can also complain to the market authority if an identifiable party sends you unsolicited commercial email outside of the law. If they're not identifiable then it's never legal, and that's what you should classify as spam because spam filters are meant to catch this. A legit business can be held accountable and has an interest in remaining in business, but real spammers aren't so simple to trace down and stop so that's what these filters are meant to do.
I get plenty of junk mail in the post. The fact that it's legal doesn't stop it being junk mail. Yes, I could take the time to write to a politician to complain about junk mail, or I could just chuck it in the trash and get on with my day.
Ditto spam. Yes, some of the spam I receive might be within the law. That doesn't stop it being spam though. I could also take the time to write to a politician to try and change the law on what spam is legal and what isn't... or I could just mark it as the spam it is and get on with my day.
What kind of junk mail? Where you gave your physical address to a third party and now they're sending you crap, but they're a legit business that you can tell to stop doing that and then you stop receiving junk mail, or do you mean they got your physical address from data leaks and the sender tries to scam you into resetting your password, sell you illegitimate drugs, etc.? You're talking as though both kinds, legal and illegal spam, are the same thing.
> Yes, I could take the time to write to a politician to complain about junk mail, or I could just chuck it in the trash and get on with my day.
What you're suggesting is messing with a spam filter designed to handle illegitimate email to get confused enough to also filter out legitimate emails based on a guess as to whether or not you might want it. You're not "just chunking it in the trash and getting on with your day" but actively harming the system instead.
> What you're suggesting is messing with a spam filter designed to handle illegitimate email
No, I'm teaching my spam filter about which emails I consider spam, so it knows to automatically filter them out in future. Which is exactly what I want my spam filter to do. That's its job. That's why I installed it.
> You're [...] actively harming the system instead.
I'd say the vast number of irrelevant commercial bullshit people get in their email harms the system more. It is spam. If I order a pair of pants from the Gap and they start sending me two or three emails a day, that is spam. If those marketing emails got marked as spam by all providers by default, the world would be better off.
Same with physical mail, which also explicitly just has an option for "bulk mail", which is even worse. If I could opt out of receiving mail from the USPS entirely, I would. (Although I consider them to be the most reliable service for sending and receiving packages.)
If I sign up for a service but don't explicitly opt in to getting their newsletter, any marketing emails I get are spam, and flagged accordingly. The whole idea that I've implicitly opted in without being asked is nonsense.
That's something to take up with your representative, because that's legal unfortunately (specifically: marketing similar products based on past purchases, and in my experience, the consumer market authority takes that definition rather broadly).
There's a second category of unwanted email where unsubscribing has as only effect that you'll get more spam because now they know that your email address is actively being read. The sender is a hacked server or a botnet, and no business is identifiable as sender. This type of illegal activity is what spam filters are designed to combat. You're not helping the designers by marking other email as spam: it muddles the data, causes legit senders trouble (like me, I don't have a newsletter but spam filters are so aggressive that personal messages sent from my server still regularly ends up in spam), and makes everyone's life harder.
I think in the Netherlands (or EU?) it has to also be one-click. It can't first give you a survey or ask you to enter your data again or other hurdles. It's quite strict in that way, but then quite loose in the way that businesses are allowed to send you unsolicited commercial (e)mail if you previously purchased something and they want to market a related product to you. Win some, lose some. I can see the point, though, that you might be genuinely interested in their new fancy better improved heat camera if you previously bought a heat camera of theirs, and the message still has to have that one-click unsubscribe link. I'm willing to accept this compromise even if I am usually not interested in those offers.
What has to die is the type of spam where you have no idea who the sender is or how they got your data. That's what spam filters are designed to filter out, since you cannot filter that by normal/legal means. It's much harder to try and make a spam filter read your mind on whether email from a legitimate business is something you're interested in reading (you may or may not care for that order confirmation, newsletter that you may or may not have signed up for, etc.).
But I've learned today (from the subthread above) that having the general public make this distinction and correctly train spam filters (such as email, but presumably also on reddit and such) together is a lost cause. We'll have spam forever, yay.
> It's much harder to try and make a spam filter read your mind on whether email from a legitimate business is something you're interested in reading (you may or may not care for that order confirmation, newsletter that you may or may not have signed up for, etc.).
No don’t be silly, if you use that button you’re actually breaking the whole system.
You’re just supposed to sit there and take the unsolicited non-spam from everyone around you and never touch that button ever, or dare call something that doesn’t fit one person’s ridiculously narrow definition of “spam” that.
And if you don’t like it, your inly course of action is obviously talking to your representatives to change the legal definition of spam. Anything else is breaking the system.
> No. Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.
The name "spam" comes from an old Monty Python skit about hearing the same thing over and over and getting sick of it, so this definition doesn't really respect the history of the term. The name spam started as a Usenet moniker some time after some lawyers started trying to get people to pay to enter the free green card lottery run by the US government.
This definition almost sounds like you're gesturing at "UCE" (unsolicited commercial email) which some people started trying to push as a definition for spam back in the day.
> Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing, but there is a way to unsubscribe.
I mean, you're responding in a thread where they mentioned that's impossible to reach that page because they're banned and ignoring that people long ago found that unsubscribe was being abused to confirm (and then sell) verified emails to other spammers.
Some of us do crazy things to let us use unique emails per service, so we can find out who is selling our info.
Did you miss where the original person is unable to unsubscribe because they were banned? In this specific scenario, it is absolutely spam, otherwise known as Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (and by virtue of them being banned, these specific mails are by definition unsolicited).
I mean, I'd report it as spam rather than as 'malicious' so I disagree with the GP on that part, but...
> sometimes I wonder if spam is such a big issue in part because users report anything they don't want in their inbox, like a newsletter they previously signed up for, as spam or similar
It's been a problem ever since some green card lottery lawyers decided to spam Usenet and then moved on to using botnets and whatnot while people fought back with DKIM and SPF and such, so I doubt it.
> This doesn't hurt paypal but might annoy a small email hoster that might have to clean up your mess.
It's not clear to me why Paypal would be routing emails through a small email host and most people are using the few big webmail providers at this point.
> If you want to hurt them
I don't think people want to hurt Paypal, they just want to turn off the damn marketing campaign when they're literally banned from the service. Personally, I just set up filters to dump all the junk like the constant emails from Amazon so that I don't have to deal with it.
Either you're at a small ISP and paypal doesn't care about a handful of customers that need to dig an email out of the spam folder, or you're at a large one and it won't have an effect because nobody else is reporting it
This doesn't hurt paypal but might annoy a small email hoster that might have to clean up your mess.
People use Paypal because they can't get around it. If you want to hurt them, help reduce their market share. Complain to the support of the service where you needed paypal, asking for better payment options (cite articles like this or whatever). That's what I do anyway, and doubly so when I know the owner. That they need to also offer paypal to get more customers, sure that's their risk (I make sure they're aware of it), but at least offer legit payment options as well