Responses Inline On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 9:07 PM, Jay Hennigan <mailop-l...@keycodes.com> wrote:
> 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. None of the above seems to be the scenario. these are purely transactional emails coming from the use of our service: our welcome email, our 'your movie is ready' email, etc etc. I can easily see that these emails have been used, e.g. the welcome email used to verify your email to the service. > > 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 can deduce this not by the virtue of open bugs, but rather by the virtue that the user used these: aside from the example above, e.g. they used the "movie is ready" email because they registered on it with the GA UTM source, or multiple hits because of forwarding of that email / multiple opens, etc. > > 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. > > As per the above, it is exactly ex-post-facto - the users used these emails and therefore did not consider them spam to begin with, and then a month later changed their mind (or possibly meant something a bit different, like trying to unregister from them in one fell swoop) > > _______________________________________________ > mailop mailing list > mailop@mailop.org > http://chilli.nosignal.org/mailman/listinfo/mailop >
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