On 9/24/15 8:04 AM, Gil Bahat wrote:
Hi,
Carefully observing our FBL complaints one by one, I see a disturbing
phenomena: users marking swaths of email, sometimes received over a
month ago as spam, accounting for a significant volume of complaints.
I see a lot of this with AOL's FBL, very little with others. This may be
due to the wording or layout of their GUI, perhaps the "Spam" and
"Delete" buttons are close together or similar in appearance. These are
typically timely, but occasionally long-delayed.
I suspect that the long-delayed bunches are "throwaway" email addresses
that are infrequently used and get a lot of spam. In fact, I personally
am "guilty" of this. I maintain a Hotmail account with a hard-to-guess
username that I use very rarely. It's only for one-off online purchases,
hotel reservations and similar very infrequent or one-time transactional
email. I only log in to read this mailbox when I expect email regarding
a recent transaction.
Despite very conscientiously unchecking all of the pre-checked "Send me
offers" buttons and *every time* in the order comments putting "This
email address is to be used for correspondence regarding this
transaction only, no spam please", it gets a TON of spam from many of
the companies with which I have done business once as well as their
"affiliates". It isn't unusual for me to log in to the Hotmail account
after a month or two to find it full of spam from an outfit I once
purchased from years ago, etc.
I mark it as the spam that it is without opening it and thus triggering
the tracking bugs, but it doesn't seem to put a dent in the flood.
I have good reason to believe this does not represent actual spam
reporting, but rather an easy to perform what would have been a more
complex (UI wise) task, tandem delete and unsubscribe.
If the recipient never subscribed with closed-loop confirmation in the
first place then "Unsubscribe" should never be necessary if the sender
is a good actor, and is a bad idea for the recipient. Doing so confirms
to an abuser that the mailbox is active and that email is being read.
Users do this to emails which they clearly read and found useful (e.g.
the welcome or email verification emails, emails which they opened,
clicked and even forwarded at times, etc etc).
Tracking bugs may show if emails are opened, but they can't read the
user's mind as to whether or not they were found useful. And they only
work if the user loads remote images by default, a security risk.
I would like to request all providers to (A) consider changing their UI
to account for this option / suggest unsubscription and deletion instead
and (B) mitigate the impact of multiple consecutive reports.
An alternative would be a confirmation dialog box "This will send a
report to the sender's ISP that the email is abuse. Future email from
this sender will be routed to your "Junk" folder. Are you sure?"
By the way, this isn't ex-post-facto. It's simply reported later than
expected. Ex-post-facto would be if the definition of "spam" changed
between when the mail was sent and when it was reported.
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