Synchro · HackerTrans

3 years agodiscuss

Get a grip. So you would consider twitter and Facebook notifications you have explicitly requested as spam? I also run a social network with 20k users that is equally accessible over web and email, and we have had peaks up to about 4 million messages/month containing nothing but conversations between users, and we run into all these bulk sending issues all the time. Please explain, oh wise one, how is emailing people messages they have explicitly asked for spam?

Synchro

3 years agodiscuss

This is exactly what the list-unsubscribe-post header from RFC8058 provides: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8058. The unsubscribe button that gmail, Apple Mail and others displays is driven by that; it's not a gmail feature.

Weirdly, if google thinks you're a dodgy sender they won't display the button, which seems counterproductive to me.

Synchro

3 years agodiscuss

Even gmail's own marketing messages (that I never asked for!) end up in my spam folder. If google can't even reliably send emails to themselves I don't know how they expect anyone else to succeed.

Synchro

3 years agodiscuss

One of the key problems is that both gmail and Yahoo UIs actively encourage users to report messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. Yahoo is particularly bad at this; it's common for me to receive spam reports from yahoo on an entirely double-opt-in social site I run. My reaction there is to remove the reporter from all lists because the amount of damage a single spam report can do is immense; a single spam report can block delivery for weeks at a time to the 10k others that legitimately requested messages. Hotmail/outlook/live is much the same in encouraging spam reporting over unsubscribe, however, their penalties are not as excessive as Yahoo's.

Synchro

3 years agodiscuss

None of that seems new. What would be new is if both gmail and Yahoo provided any means of allowing legit bulk senders to actually send properly.

The one-click unsubscribe is from 2017's RFC8058. Everyone that's sending in volume is already doing all the usual stuff - DKIM, SPF, DMARC, matching reverse IPs, etc.

The privacy-first email marketing service I wrote (https://info.smartmessages.net) implements account-wide unsubscribe by default (unsubscribing you from one list unsubscribes you from all). It requires double opt-in, and asks for explicit consent before doing any tracking whatsoever (so no Google Analytics, no cookies, no trackers), which of course is what the (at least EU and UK) law requires. You're not going to see shitty exploiters like MailChimp doing anything like this; abusing your data is just too lucrative.

It's still ridiculously hard to deliver messages at any volume, and there is zero recourse when you are penalised incorrectly. Gmail's spam filtering is just dire - if I send myself an email from gmail, it goes into spam. A large proportion of the spam I receive is sent from gmail.

Google's postmaster tools are a joke. It's entirely normal for them to give you a "bad" spam rating when you have 0 spam reports, 0 auth failures, strict DKIM and DMARC, and every single message has double-opt-in audit trails. This useless feedback makes it very difficult for senders to actually comply with their ever stricter, but ever more opaque requirements.

Proving that subscribers actually want to receive messages from you its difficult. So back in 2017 I wrote an outline proposal https://github.com/Smartmessages/subscriptionproofrfc to create a standard, possibly built on top of DKIM keys, to provide provable subscriptions. This would pretty much solve the entire thing for legit senders, but of course the industry is not really interested in cooperation or complying with any law that might reduce the number of people they send to by even the tiniest amount.

/cynicalrant

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