Increasing amount of unsolicited mail

It seems that many web sites are sending an increasing amount of unsolicited email – even from legitimate sites. For example, I started to received “daily digests” from Reddit. I rarely look at Reddit and never signed up for email. But there they are. I opted out. We’ll see if they return.

A number of news sites have taken to sending daily emails, even ones that I know I unsubscribed to in the past have resurrected themselves and started sending the daily messages. And a few sites are boldly not even providing an opt out option at all. Those are the ones that I flag as spam with SpamSieve.

Definitely a first world issue, but publishers seem to have spread the message: “go ahead and spam them, maybe it will work out ok”.

Katie

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What? You still receive unsolicited mail? I thought they got rid of that 16 years ago :grinning:


“The problem of spam e-mail messages will be gone within two years, Bill Gates promised Friday. Speaking at a late-night session of the World Economic Forum, Mr. Gates, the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, said the company was working on three ways to enable e-mail users to keep spam out of their computers.”

  • New York Times, Jan 26, 2004

When I’m dealing with a company that I’ve ordered from, etc. I’ll unsubscribe from their notices and if I receive any more messages after 30 days or so I usually Block the address. Which, in Gmail, sends future messages to my spam folder.

If it’s from some random sender I mark it as spam which sends it to my spam folder and sends a copy to Google where they may or may not decide to block the sender from emailing other users.

I agree!

What’s driving me nuts right now are the number of emails I get from any store from which I make an online purchase. Order confirmation / receipt. Shipping notification (I get that from the package carrier as well). “It’s going to arrive today” notification (I get that from the package carrier as well). Item delivered (I get that from the package carrier as well). Follow up survey. Follow up drip marketing. And that’s the point when I remember to unsubscribe.

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I delete around 200+ Mails in the morning, and do usually the same in the evening again.
I use SpamSieve which is not free of mistakes, but overall is doing it’s job.
And I also have a KM-Shortcut to mark and delete all mails inside a folder with one step.

Summary

And yet you’re helping to plot it in this thread…:stuck_out_tongue:

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Indeed. I felt the irony myself as I posted that.

In my defense (there is none) - that was a project from about 7 years ago and I don’t do that kind of work any more.

But yes. I have met the enemy. He is me.

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Maybe there should be a kind of porto for each Mail, say a cent or a fraction of that.
That would probably stop those mass mailings…

I think something like that was discussed at one time. Seems like it involved solving a complex problem before you could send an email. Without the solution “stamp” an email would be rejected. Doing this would require larger servers etc. thus raising the cost of sending an email.

It would be no big deal unless you are sending out millions of emails every day. Or offering free mail services. But it would do nothing to stop spam being sent from hijacked desktops which, at the time, were sending about 33% of all spam.

Today large email providers like Microsoft and Google use machine learning to filter spam and phishing emails.

I could stop also the sending from a botnet, if the sender has to confirm the sending separate.
And it could be solved e.g. with a kind of credit you have to get from your provider, to use it with the sending of the mails.
It could also reduce the huge amount of power, that is consumed by “the internet” for sending unnecessary mails.
But, anyway, I´m just dreaming for a better world… :innocent: :smiling_face_with_tear:

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Aren’t we all. :+1:


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I believe companies like this are the source of your problem:

That’s narvar. I despise those emails too. It has helped being able to block the domain narvar.com, as a lot of the stores I shop at use their platform for those irritating excessive emails. That way I only get the order confirmation email that comes from the actual vendor’s address; the rest come from a ‘vendorname@narvar.com’ address.

any reason for using Masked email from Fastmail + 1password