You can do this, I have done this, but honestly it's annoyingly painful and you're always one bad ad campaign away from being nuked to death by people marking your emails as spam.

There's a lot of rules to follow and even when you follow them you need to ensure that you start emailing a low volume for each new sending IP until the reputation grows over time.

Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually.

We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super easy to unsubscribe, emailed once a month at most; and we had people still marking our communications as spam. I'm not sure what else we could have done to weed out the people who just smack the spam button honestly.

That said, there was a lot of variance, emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months.

I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button.

You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much spam I’m not going to try to figure out what is actually spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking “unsubscribe” links in emails I assume are malicious spam anyway. If it looks automated and I don’t know what it is or can’t remember why I’m getting it, it’s spam.

Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign up to receive a marketing email so if I do receive yours it’s either spam or you tricked me into signing up for it, so it’s also spam as far as I’m concerned.

You may be fine with all that but remember that selling pays for engineering salaries.

thats fair, some people do it for the promise of getting some deals, something we actually delivered on often as when we wanted to clear the warehouse we sent discount/clearance emails to the signed up users rather than putting it on the site.

We used to also trial “own produced” products at discounted rates for people as a sort of beta test.

I don’t, and yet I still do, so I can’t tell what marketing emails are “legitimate” because a website pre-checked a small box I didn’t notice or are simply spam, so it all gets marked spam.

They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works and just assume that the purpose of marking something is spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it, personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that their preference thus exerts a small influence over the experience of potentially millions of other people.

In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users, the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the spam button. But today that definition is something closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I am fairly certain few if any other people are interested in seeing, either."

You bet I'm going to mark it as spam and I hope it creates trouble for the sender.

PS: I assume we all agree scams, "Russian singles", chain letters, "little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer", etc, are all spam. That's a shared common ground.

Google et al. can’t tell the difference when you hit spam.

We never bought or sold any email lists, we went out of our way to ensure you wanted to be on the list- we made it single link with no extra checkbox or button to unsubscribe, we emailed only occasionally and above all we did our absolute best to make the content humorous and engaging.

You can make the case that there should be “no automated mail trying to sell things” and honestly, thats fine, but why the hell are people marking the receipts for things they bought as spam?

I'm someone who often marks receipts for things that were bought as spam. Note that I said things that were bought—not things that I bought.

I have the rare privilege of having an e-mail address which is ${common_first_name}.${non_rare_last_name}@gmail.com, and I am sick and tired of businesses that do no e-mail verification of the addresses of their customers. I will simply delete good old "Click here to confirm your address", but I have no patience for the hundreds of emails I receive because either businesses keep asking customers with my same name who do not understand what email is for their "email address", or because businesses ignore the email confirmation/verification step out of sheer incompetence or out the product-cult of "conversion" rates. Those I mark as spam, because I want them to pay the price.

5% seems to be about the noise floor of any human activity. Mistakes, carelessness, ignorance, stupidity, mental illnesses. You can’t assume any rhyme or reason for it.

I never thought people did that. That's definitely not spam. It is a one-time interaction confirming an operation you just did. Also not spam: when you buy something and the tracking sends you updates via mail.

I am certain rising ipv4 prices are dictated by spammers but only availability.

No one likes spam but when you have to send legitimate emails you quickly learn the other side of the problem as well.

My email address and phone notifications are a direct link to me and are sacred in terms of getting my attention. Yet many companies confuse getting my email address with permission to mail me anything at any frequency. They also believe that "unsubscribe" should be able to redirect me to a website with a bunch of confusing checkboxes. Neither is acceptable.

So, when I click "unsubscribe", that should immediately unsubscribe me forever with no extra efforts, but so many emailers don't do this that I just gave up and started reporting spam.

> emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months

A guess with no info, but it sounds like a case of not removing unengaged recipients, then suddenly getting their attention with a different looking subject line or an email that came at an unexpected time.

If people receive bulk for a long time and they never engage, remove them from the list or pause sending to them to avoid this effect.

[1] - For those who don't know much about email, two things should happen when you click the spam button in Gmail and select "Unsubscribe and report spam" (it's been a while, correct me if this changed):

1) List-Unsubscribe should be triggered and this should unsub you from the list. In 2023, I personally expect this to be immediate and receive no more email but I give senders a window of a day or so.

2) The FBL should give the sender a signal that this specific campaign was considered spam.

Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email.

I’m sure you mean the content of the email, but we dont reach out to double opt-in users or transactional emails with an unsubscribe link, since you chose to be there.

The unsubscribe link lives near the bottom of the email along with the link to support, in clear text in a font and colour that matches the content.

Nope! Just checked Gmail WebView. There is a toolbar at the top with a very prominent"spam" button, and two kebab menus with "filter messages like this", "report spam", "report phishing", but no unsubscribe button.

In Gmail it will appear as a banner underneath the row of buttons

I've never seen such a thing. I just checked Thunderbird, on an email that has an unsubscribe link. There was no such button.

When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in some huge html template and the amount needs to be converted.

When I buy something in a physical store they have the decency to ask if I want a receipt. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for online stores/services to get, ask me if I want a receipt, don't just stick it in my inbox because you have my email address.

2 things though.

1) Your goods arent given to you at point of sale with online transactions.

what happens then if it doesn't show up? tracking numbers aren’t always generated on the fly (it depends mostly on the postal service being used if the site can pre-generate tracking numbers).

2) How do you return the item, if you have no proof of purchase?

You could say “keep it in my account” but then how do we even keep an account for you if we cant even verify your email address for password reset mails?

And if that's not the case then how about asking me if I would like an email with a tracking number when it ships?

2) I have never had to show an email as proof when returning something, usually they know damn well that I bought and paid for it.

In general it seems like you are conflating all the different kinds of email as being one and the same. They are not. I specifically said I don't want receipts by default because they are just spam in the vast majority of cases. I never said anything about email verification emails or shipping emails with tracking numbers.

Edit: I just wanted to add that needing a receipt for a refund is a truly alien concept to me. I can’t even imagine how bad the consumer protection laws are where you live.

Here, even in physical stores we can just give them the card we used to buy the thing and that’s enough to process a refund.

if you buy something online, IE via an ecommerce site like aliexpress or amazon, how do you get a receipt if you dont have an account.

returning an item requires a receipt in the majority of cases unless the product ships directly with a return label.

Nope, not here. If you have to return something then you contact the company and they will verify from their records that you bought it, usually by looking up the purchase by the card you used.

And the times I have tried to claim expenses as work related (in Australia) that I bought online I have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD.

Claiming expenses is different to tax requirements. With tax you need the receipt as a record, but the general ledger actually records the amount in whatever currency you use.

For expense claims every company does it differently.

Anyway, it's besides the point. The point is that online stores should ask, a tick box would do, as the majority of the time I don't want the receipt and don't need it for anything at all.

If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that business I never had any business with starts spamming me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask for permission.

Unfortunately I have a few technology-challenged acquaintances still using my common-ish firslast@ gmail, but once I get them switched over, everything that inbox receives will automatically be marked as spam.

Double opt-in.

You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used to send you an email with a link to click to complete the process.

For transactional email this would be handled by getting people to either create an account or use Paypal for guest checkout. (this was 2012)

i see about the same thing. and i'm purely sending transactional receipts (that is, immediately after purchase. not for subscription or pre-order or something disconnected from the user having just entered their email in the "send my receipt to" field) and for non-trivial amounts (averaging around $100). i can't understand how so many people mark them as spam, and although i have no evidence to support it i have to assume that some poorly-configured firewalls are sending spam reports automatically.

Right now the common enemy of illegal spammers externalize the costs of their business onto email providers and users. For every dollar they take they impose 100x that in spam filtering costs. >99.9% of raw email traffic is spam.

Blame spammers who offer fake unsubscribe links. Or companies who violate CAN-SPAM by requiring login to unsubscribe instead of one click opt-out. Marking as spam always works.

He was otherwise highly functional, spoke and wrote fluently in three languages but hadn't noticed the difference between spam and delete.

(these are all legitimate interest emails)

I was in a meeting with a couple of people from the team and a QA engineer mentioned that everytime he's done with an email in gmail, he spams it off... _wut_..

Whilst yes, we have been blacklisted a handful of times and, based on spam reports (feedback loops), people do mark emails as spam for completely nonsensical reasons... e.g. users signing up, (getting and using the activation email), using the service and then spamming the activation email.

Edit: I definitely think there's a bell curve for sending your own emails:

* If you have a very small platform (at least in my experience), reputation doesn't mean that much, emails are generally accepted by providers (assuming IPs that you used haven't been previously used for spammy activity), so self-hosting might make some sense (though a third-party probably wouldn't be too expensive if you did want to).

* If you start sending 100s-1000s of emails/day, I guess some third party solution would make sense, since running dedicated IPs/domains and servers just for sending emails might not be beneficial.

* As you go to sending 100K+ emails a day, personally, I think setting up servers starts making more sense

Email deliverability is a full time job. There are so many "potential spam" markers that are interpreted differently (and opaquely) by different ESPs. Getting your email delivered to a lot of people is essentially non deterministic.

Including a link to a Google Doc in your message body is enough to get you blacklisted by some email providers if you don't have a prior history with them. Yes, there will usually be some process to get off the blacklists and doing it will mostly stick even if you continue to email Google Docs to people. But the key word there is mostly. As I said, deliverability (at least at scale) is a full time job.

(I truly don't know, but I don't think it's as simple as you're saying)

People use Gmail because they legitimately want to filter out the unsolicited spam, marketing, etc. To an anonymous attacker, there is no cost to send these emails. Middlemen like MailChimp and Sendgrid play the role of converting email from a free, publicly exploitable channel into a paid, KYC one.

Email fbfw is the de facto standard communication channel for almost everything, but by design a single computer can send an unlimited number of emails to other addresses. This maybe was a good enough design originally, but now the role of email has grown so much that, today, it should be a paid KYC channel.

What is the alternative to spam filtering? Everyone maintains their own allowlist of good senders?

Make sending email cost the sender. No, I don't know how. The best ideas I've heard (1) make the sender store the message and (2) have no hope of being widely adopted.

The global spam market is what caused the hockey-stick rise in IPv4 "shortage"

It only takes a moment for a single person to get your ip or domain balacklisted, not a concerted campaign. There are many blacklists that accept direct submissions from any unauthenticated person for any target domain/ip.

What's difficult is not to get onto a blacklist but to get off of a blacklist.

You can follow all the rules the want ( dkim, spf etc .. ) somehow it will no be delivered because you don't know exaclty how they rate your IP.

Host your mail-creation/list-management/analytics stack yourself (I like Mautic and MailWizz but there are other options) and use a third party for SMTP services. Amazon SES charges $1 per 10,000 emails; other services are slightly more expensive but it's all still very affordable.

A lot of us haven't.

> If someone wants to host their own software but actually have their emails delivered they really do need a third party SMTP service that specialized in deliverability or has a big company behind it.

A lot of us don't.

The company I work for has an outbox feature which supports this and it was a non-trivial problem to solve. We ended up using sparkpost with a bunch of modifications to isolate potentially bad actors (i.e., clients who pay for our software but send what is basically spam) to an individual sending pool. We also have CSMs that handle this and help to coach clients to not send spam.

https://support.sparkpost.com/docs/deliverability

Same reason why companies use Sendgrid for marketing campaigns.

A mail server software like mdaemon can quickly handle the heavy lifting of improving deliverability. It’s a small price for the deliverability. I’m just a former user of it.

It’s ok to use an external email provider for outgoing email delivery.

ESPs (email service providers) are handy because they can separate outgoing transactional emails from marketing ones to ensure deliverability.

Many people dont realize that spam was the original source for social networking...

I cant type up all the history I know quickly, but Friendster (who 'invented the social graph', HI5, Tagged, MySpace, were all started as an overlay to email harvesting mechanisms to --> spam....

They needed to create high value email-lists of valid emails.

Asking for such, was stupid as most people rejected it.

Then, they figured out that adding a service (chat and share with your friends, give us your email and their email so we can connect you by sending them invites etc) was the best social-engineering (the 'hacker' meaning) mechanism was to have people validate their personal email, offer a novel e-'service' to 'connect' with your friends within some context - and have you pre-validate the email list based on your invites and contacts... then parlay MLM structure to create better more validated email lists.

Then you sell the lists on the BM to spammers looking to avoid a high bounce rate based on real emails.

Then they started nefariously stealing your contacts with auto-opt-in agreements and such....

Then as the battle btwn spam and socially-interesting services ramped up the spam companies (such as Postini (which was bought by google) became the spam filters (selling their services to BigCorps) began to realize that filtering on the sending IPs was a good measure for determining spam (along with rate-limiting, and other aspects) - such that spammers were getting blocked based on delivery IP blocks.

This set-off a market incentive for spammers to buy up swaths of IPv4 blocks so they could swap out IPs...

Then there were many ranges, sources, tracrts etc used to determine senders and ID them as spammers etc....

So - the spammers invented VPN/Tunneling delivery routes such they could send to a number of various global relays so that they could send from a central source of machines, but be delivered to the endpoints from a variety of global IP blocks.

There was a market for IPv4 blocks all over the world and spammers were spending big bucks on all aspects, from paying for the IP blocks, relationships with ISP/VPN/etc tech....

All while attempting to provide what was a thin layer of utility service to the user to keep what was effectively continued access to the growing address books of their users and keep them engaged on the platform such that they could keep knowing if existing or new contacts were valid.

There were even back-room deals between spammers/tech/isp etc to allow access.

So, the "social networks" we know know of were birthed literally upon spam.

-

Have you ever wondered why as soon as tiktock came out, all of a sudden a fuck-ton of spam was hitting your gmail inbox (previously postini) <-- Because tictock was eating the revenue lunch.

Zuck literally stated that the entire revenue model for FB was "senator, we sell ads"

When in an interview with Google, they asked "what kind of company do you think google is "Well, most people think youre a search engine, but youre actually an advertisement correlation engine"

In an interview with Twitter (dont forget about the infamous ATT room 641A?) - what do you think twitter is: "Twitter is a global sentiment monitering engine" (this was ~2006?8? I cant recall)

--

Source: I know these founders and many of the original devops members from the above companies, and other more scary outcomes from the above statements.

And here we are today with the advanced learning all built upon "consumption" ad algos