What Are Stores Even Thinking With All These Emails? 74
Your inbox is now a shopping mall. From a column: Email is one of the few ways companies can reach their customers directly. In fact, people overwhelmingly say that the way they want to hear from brands is by email, Chad S. White, the head of research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, told me. That's why the mailbox software started suppressing messages -- to protect people from companies' temptation to send too many emails. In response, email marketers obsess over "deliverability," or how the content and frequency of their emails might help those messages actually hit your inbox in the first place. But that process has created new and weird feedback loops, in which some companies and certain messages might be able to reach your inbox more readily than before, while others get junked -- condemned to spam, deleted, or the like -- before you see them.
As a result, your personal inbox gradually has become less like a mailbox and more like a wormhole into every business relationship you maintain: your bank; your utility provider; your supermarket; your favorite boutiques, restaurants, housewares providers, and all the rest. It's your own digital commercial district: Opening up email is akin to visiting a little mall in your browser or on your phone, where every shop is right next to every other. A few years ago, Gmail made that metaphor concrete by introducing the promotions folder, recasting spam as marketing. When you're in the mood to shop, just drop into promotions and see what's on offer (or search for a favorite brand to see the latest wares).
As a result, your personal inbox gradually has become less like a mailbox and more like a wormhole into every business relationship you maintain: your bank; your utility provider; your supermarket; your favorite boutiques, restaurants, housewares providers, and all the rest. It's your own digital commercial district: Opening up email is akin to visiting a little mall in your browser or on your phone, where every shop is right next to every other. A few years ago, Gmail made that metaphor concrete by introducing the promotions folder, recasting spam as marketing. When you're in the mood to shop, just drop into promotions and see what's on offer (or search for a favorite brand to see the latest wares).
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About as effective as your regular posts.
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Translation: "Here's my idea of an impossibly complicated solution that absolutely does not exist in reality, but I think you'll believe it and fall down on your knees in envy!"
And you posted as AC, so you don't even get the temporary thrill of someone falling for it and thinking you're smart.
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In order to get the email address that I actually check, a company must sign a nondisclosure agreement prohibiting them from sharing it with anyone (including "affiliates"), with $1M in liquidated damages for failure to comply. They must also agree to pay $50 per email they send as a "reading fee" to compensate me for the time I spend reading their email.
Bullshit. No company on the planet is signing that.
If they accept, they get their very own unique destination email that will alias to my inbox (the unique destination address will clue me in that they have shared my email address, if I start getting emails from others).
If your concerned about companies selling/sharing your e-mail against their terms of service, that is a good way to do it.
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That's the point, you're not meant to accept it. It's basically telling the company "Go fuck yourself, I can't trust you."
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This is just not true. I have a gmail address that regularly receives emails from Verizon, AT&T, Best Buy, Comcast, Home Depot, U-Haul, Allstate, SiriusXM, and many others. Not to mention all the spew from Sendgrid, Mailgun, Mailchimp, Mailjet, and again, many others. I do not have account with any of these companies, I have never signed up for any mailing list with this address, and not a single one of them have ever once confirmed the email address. They get it, and spam it.
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And my point is that there seem to be scads of person out there who just use "random" email addresses and then those poor persons get all the spew (without confirming that they want the crap). The person above me said that "every confirms email addresses" and that is just not the case. Optimum Cable spammed me for 3+ years for someone else's account, I had to do a corporate email campaign to finally get them to stop.
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Yeah, we're talking two completely different things. I'm certainly not disagreeing with you. I also get e-mails all the time from stuff I never signed up for, but that's not the point I'm making. I'm saying that either OP is full of shit, or they don't use any sort of online service that requires them to create an account.
To clarify my original point: You are absolutely correct, you don't have to confirm all e-mail addresses. When you walk into BestBuy (or wherever) you can give them whatever e-mail you
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Seems to be hit or miss on that. Some of those emails I get are clearly tied to accounts (they have the same name in them). Some companies apparently do not check if an email already exists (yes, I have received multiple Verizon bills in the same month, none of them mine), then you get the truly asinine. Just this afternoon, AT&T sent me 5 emails. I do not have an account with them (never have), and one of them was a confirm your change of email address message. Yes, someone changed their AT&T
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Nobody wants to "hear from brands", period (Score:4, Insightful)
And boy does this guy have Stockholm Syndrome. "Technically, I asked for these emails. I wrote loans with my mortgage broker. I’ve bought furniture from Room & Board and pants from Bonobos.". No. Doing business with somebody once isn't "asking for emails". Every piece of email you get from somebody you bought something from, unless it's part of a transaction you initiated, is straight-up spam.
Re: Nobody wants to "hear from brands", period (Score:2)
The Atlantic went downhill a few years ago when they hired a bunch of inclusivity experts whose only writing experience was on tumblr blogs and Twitter outrage storms.
Itâ(TM)s all doom and gloom now. I canceled my subscription last year. Pity.
Re:Nobody wants to "hear from brands", period (Score:5, Insightful)
While I don't like that I have to do this at all - it is simple enough to opt back out of all those emails I ostensibly opted into when I buy something.
You don't have to keep getting barraged by email from these "legitimate" companies. The first email - and every subsequent email - almost certainly will have an "unsubscribe" link. And, in my experience, pretty much all the companies honor that (heck, very few of the companies run their own mailing lists anyway).
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That's cute, you think unsubscribe makes them not sell your information to anyone and everyone who waggles a dollar under their noses.
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In what way is that "worst?" Just practice saying, "No thank you." When they ask for your phone number and you say, "No thank you" they also don't bother asking for your email.
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You moved the goalposts pretty quickly there, and in the most rude of ways, cutie.
The discussion is about reception of emails, and now you're talking about selling of data.
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I neither moved nor planted goalposts. The topic is getting flooded with email from "brands" and part of that is the buying and selling of contact info.
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Unfortunately, if they are someone you bought something from, that ship has already sailed. So it really boils down to whether you want them to stop sending you spam or if you'd rather just ignore/block it.
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If the business partners this poster engaged with are typical, the EULA or other agreement accepted or not opted-out of specified they could send marketing and other communications, based on the relationship. Bot saying that is ok, but it is universally disclosed, and while in small print, or below the fold, or late in the process, it's most always there.
Me? I loathe websites that whack me with 'join our email...' or 'subscribe to....', or 'we want to send your browser notifications' instantly the first tim
The want a nice place in my blocklist! (Score:3)
And they are getting it for free. Fortunately, companies I care about (European) are _not_ allowed to send you email unless you have a business relationship with them. And even then, most use restraint.
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That's what the story says. Now as far as restraint that's debatable. Everyone has a different threshold.
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True.
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When I get an unwanted email from an EU/UK company I usually respond with a Subject Data Access Request. That way they have to give me all the data they have relating to me and I can figure out if a) they had permission to send me an email and b) how they got it.
Depending on the response I follow up with either a request to delete all data relating to me and not collect any more, ever, or a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office.
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That sounds like a pretty boring hobby, though.
A whole lot of blabbering with no point. (Score:5, Insightful)
The author concludes their blabbering by suggesting to just give up and let it happen. Pff, if I don't want their mail anymore I unsubscribe. If that doesn't work it gets added to the junk filter.
I feel bad for the author that thinks they are hopelessly stuck in the hole that they dug themselves into.
When you throw shit at the wall to see what sticks (Score:2)
Obviously, the more's the better!
If they have something better than shit to throw at you, they won't be sending you emails (which is the cheapest option).
Unsubscribe? (Score:3)
All those marketing emails come with an Unsubscribe button at the bottom. I find they work about 90% of the time, though I'm still getting Blinds2Go ads years after my wife ordered blinds from them and I unsubscribed. Anyway, i find my email box only becomes as overrun with that crap as I let it.
Re:Unsubscribe? (Score:4, Funny)
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And so do the fake emails! It's going to be tougher in the future to figure out which ones are real unsubscribes, and which are clickbait. I fear for my parents.
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Why do you think it is a good idea to provide free validation that someone is actually reading the mail that that address, thus increasing its value to resell in a mailing list?
Re: Unsubscribe? (Score:1)
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Mail from reputable marketing platforms is going to be something I asked for, so it isn't even spam.
Spam by definition is something I didn't ask for, so their mailing practices are already fishy.
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An email blizzard actually has the opposite effect on the recipient than is hoped for - it breeds anger and resentment, not support. I wish these companies would realize that.
did you reply and let them know? i wonder if they even read their replies.
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I've got that problem with snail mail. My mortgage company keeps sending emails that say, "We have lowered our rates! Refinance now!!!"
Of course, they're all 30 year mortgages, and I have less than 15 years to go...
I finally sent a complaint saying that if they send me one more of those, I *WILL* refinance... with another mortgage company.
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Dammit. Snail mail, not email in the second sentence.
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An email blizzard actually has the opposite effect on the recipient than is hoped for - it breeds anger and resentment, not support. I wish these companies would realize that.
Absolutely this.
There are companies i have bought from once (or even send an enquiry to and never bought from), who see fit to now send multiple emails a day. Companies which do this very quickly end up on my blacklist and i won't buy anything further from them. If i need similar products in future, i will seek out alternative suppliers.
If the only emails i receive from a company are related to the transactions or inquiries i have with them then i will archive those records, and go to those companies agains
Really? (Score:1, Troll)
The article sounds like the writer knows nothing about the Internet. The only email I get is from companies that I want email from. If you are getting email as described you have nobody else to blame but yourself. SPAM has practically disappeared except a few random DKIM signed spam from Outlook, Google, Yahoo and other big boys which are very difficult to filter out without catching legitimate email.
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So, just like ... (Score:3)
At least with e-mail, I don't have to wander across the street in my bathrobe to empty it (although that can be a thrill in some ways).
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Pleasant Surprise (Score:3)
Despite all of Google's failures to live up to expectations over the last 20+ years; the promotions folder is a pleasant surprise.
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Really? I disabled that 'feature' straight away. It was putting too much actual mail in there.
I can sort my own emails, thank you very much.
reaching my mailbox is very easy (Score:3)
reaching my mailbox is very easy. the auto-reply gives the precise instructions on how to do it, in us_EN, entirely in ASCII (to avoid any UNICODE decoding issues). it includes the URL to go to and tells the sender what info is needed. i don't understand what difficulty so many people are having with this. over a couple dozen people have successfully passed their email to me.
Um (Score:2)
As a result, your personal inbox gradually has become less like a mailbox and more like a wormhole into every business relationship you maintain: your bank; your utility provider; your supermarket; your favorite boutiques, restaurants, housewares providers, and all the rest. It's your own digital commercial district:
Has this guy ever had a mailbox? Unless you went on a (mostly fruitless) jihad to stop it, then this is precisely what physical mailboxes looked like.
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this is precisely what physical mailboxes looked like.
Look like. This is what physical mailboxes look like.
Badly targeted spam (Score:3)
Be safe(r) (Score:2)
There can't possibly be another explanation... (Score:2)
The truth is far more terrifying... (Score:1)
These "people" are not us, and yes, they really do want to get email. I don't understand it, but working in the industry, I cannot deny it. There are a several dynamics that give rise to perversely excessive amounts of email across the board, but at the heart of it all, you'll find 10 or 20 million people who *really do* *actually* want companies clogging up their inboxes, and they reward the behavior by following links from those emails to buy things.
The senders then tune their programs to serve these most
stay away from my e-mail. (Score:1)
Listen folks, could we just please ... (Score:2)
... *finally* redo E-Mail and the underlying DNS right along with it? We've been observing this for 25+ years now. For Effs sake, we're being lazy here and building new Desktops and WMs by the dozen instead of fixing a messaging protocol from the steam age of computing, built for passing text-notes around on a mainframe, for chrisakes.
With a redone distributed nameservice like namecoin and a proper asymetric crypto & sinage mail/messaging protocol spam would simply vanish. Let's build the nameservice, n
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Don't make me pull out the "Your post advocates a...approach to fighting spam." template.
All these emails? (Score:3)
Just create an email-address just for shopping, I even use additional separate ones for Amazon, Ebay and a few others.
Delete the crap from time to time and you are OK.
It's easier and quicker than filters that you have to adapt all along.
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Re: All these emails? (Score:2)
The problem with that approach is some companies will reject the address and others will strip it. Still good to have another go-to solution.
They are a tool of harassment (Score:2)
I noticed after one particularly spirited exchange here on Slashdot some years ago my spam volume sharply increased. Someone has been signing up for things in my name so that I get their receipts and whatnot, putting my address down when they get a car wash or whatever.
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That's called a superfan. You should try to sell them some swag, maybe they'd be willing to buy paper targets with your picture, or a shirt where you're drawn to look like Cartman?
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I guess it's worth a shot if I can get paid. Clearly I'm occupying their thoughts, which is so sad I can barely stand it. Maybe that's their goal, to make me so sad for them that I cannot bear this existence.
Unsubscribe (Score:1)
That Guy is Clueless (Score:2)
The main problem is Ebay. I need to turn them on while I am selling or buying, and during that window there is a shower of spam from them, mostly trying to sell me the same stuff that I am trying to sell myself. Idiots.
Duluth and Work (Score:2)
Duluth Trading Company has the system figured out. They produce an excellent product, but their normal prices are EXTREMELY high. Fortunately (?!?!?!?!) they send out constant emails, several per week at times, with specials and more reasonable pricing on everything. Basically if you want their product at a reasonable price you have to submit to almost constant spam.
At work I immediately block any unsolicited commercial email, including emails tied to an individual sales/marketing person's email address.