FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually.

They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.

If I catch any of these email lists not respecting my unsubscribing, I immediately mark them as "spam".

Gmail then doesn't send them to my inbox anymore. I don't think just one person marking them as spam hurts them, but at least I feel gratified and my ego is satisfied.

Ahh yes, the feel-good response that Google gives you without doing anything substantial to prevent spam from reaching you in the future.

Anyway, email delivery is regulated by Microsoft and Google.

Most, if not all, political junk email also ends up in my spam folder after judicious use of the spam button a few years ago.

What is your experience?

Reporting spam does not block the email from being received by my client -- it only blocks the mail from being seen in the inbox, but it still shows up in the spam box.

I don't send mail that gets reported as spam in the first place. Or, if it does, then I haven't been meaningfully affected because I can still send and receive the email I want to.

I've had numerous "businesses" that I've reported spam end up back in my gmail inbox after years.

I've stopped using gmail because of it not iterating on spam blocking capabilities.

> I don't send mail that gets reported as spam in the first place.

I ran a newsletter where people had to opt in to receiving it. It was announce news for a video game. You only ended up on this list if you entered your email, clicked join list, and then clicked the link in the email we sent to you to confirm subscription. We had a big unsubscribe button at the very top of the email. We still regularly got people who hit report spam on us, presumably as a way of saying g they didn’t want the email anymore.

it's not me, it's you. Screw you if you send me mail I don't want!

I've seen how the campaigns pass around email addresses without consent. (Mostly from ActBlue) So I'm concerned about validating an email address via unsubscribe.

I've reported this to abuse at sendgrid, and now sparkpostmail. They're shopping for email services.

Proof of org spamming:

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; dkim=pass header.i=@e.kamalaharris.com header.s=ak01 header.b=kJamWIyP; spf=pass (google.com: domain of bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com designates 168.203.32.245 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com; dmarc=pass (p=REJECT sp=REJECT dis=NONE) header.from=e.kamalaharris.com

Meanwhile he gets a text asking for a blood donation more or less every week.

Throw something in the cart at a random website? Now you're on their mailing list and get reminders to finish checking out. Doesn't matter that you never consented. I don't know how this isn't a violate of the CAN-SPAM act

An elegant weapon of a more civilized age (the early internet): if they're pushy in requiring one -- just lie.

This would pair nicely with a progressive fine structure based on the income/assets of the offender that grows exponentially after every offense.

I would get two or three emails a month from them, and I would click unsubscribe every time. The emails would continue. Finally, in 2018, I got the "We're sorry to see you go" unsubscribe confirmation email.

Then about three months ago, I started getting emails from the Rensselaer Office of Annual Giving. But this time it was to my work email, not my personal email. How would they get my work email address?

I have no idea how this happened, but I suspect universities play fast and loose with their mailing lists for exactly the reason you said. It's obnoxious.

They're probably expecting their email provider to take that info and use it somewhere upstream of their own individual account. Which, as you've pointed out, does happen.

Maybe they don't believe that it happens often enough or something, but the thresholds do need to be reasonably high since, as you pointed out, some people hit the button whether it's justified or not. If the threshold for email provider action was too low, you'd end up not being able to send to anyone with Gmail because one guy forgot he signed up to a list (or signed up and immediately reported it as spam to spite the sender).

The person you replied to also sounds like they may be using an offline or third-party email client, though. There's a difference between a "Report Spam" button somewhere your email provider controls, and a "Mark as Spam" button in your third-party email client. I'd assume there's some kind of protocol that could potentially allow third-party clients to report it back to the email provider, but would also assume it may not be as reliable as first-party interfaces.

Later they create another list and you end up subscribed to just that new one, even though the unsubscribe from all option is still selected.

Edit: Another pet peeve is when you click the link to unsubscribe, and they want you to enter your email address. Bonus points are awarded when your email is in the querystring, but they fail to populate it.

Also, as a general rule politicians will carve themselves an exemption to any rules they put on everyone else. For example, CAN SPAM applies to commercial email.

I’ve unsubscribed from at least 3-4 different types of emails from them already.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/recurring-don...

Trump and Biden both spammed my physical mailbox with the usual slick mailers, though the Biden campaign had an interesting twist in that I kept getting what appeared to be hand written postcards from people in metro Atlanta where I lived but every single one of those post cards was postmarked San Francisco. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and think maybe the postcards were written in bulk by the actual people in the Atlanta area and then sent to some Biden associated organization in SF, who then paid the postage for all the individual postcards to go out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-ma...

https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerryman...

There is three times as much outside money going to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency as the Republican one:

https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_candidate

And I have to disagree with the OP, though, because the only people who obey CAN-SPAM are the people who are generally not actually real spammers.

CAN-SPAM really only helps you get unsubscribed from marketing emails, not actually spam at all. As with all laws, outlaws will ignore them while law-abiding citizens get caught by them. Real spammers don't care and casually flout laws until, finally, they get caught by technological means.

As usual, the regulations are too little, too late, and apply to a completely different group of people than is even named in the title.

Some site I haven't used in 5 years reminding me to login and check out their deals? Sounds like a phishing trap to me.

For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore.

Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.

Exactly, this is the core of the problem. Thought I am grateful for the "unsubscribe" option... I am putridly disgusted by the humiliation of unsubscribing to something I never subscribed to in the first place. It's just awkward and sleazy all around. Put simply : if a name is to be added to such a list, it shall require the consent of said person a priori, a new consent must be made per each list, with blanket future consent strictly banned, and secondly mass solicitations for consent also banned.

To those of you who live in California, I expect many, I would advise in these cases to invoke the CCPA act i.e. (a) "give me all the data you have on me" (b) "delete all the data you have on me". You need to ask (a) first, then given that, then ask (b). If you imply you want the data deleted, they will just delete it and say "oopsie we can't provide you the data", so it's important to perform this sequential order. If Californians did this at mass scale I would imagine there would be a lot of positive bleedover to other states in limiting this behavior.

Report spam, as a generic feature? It's an okay starting point "as-is" but useless for preventing malicious use and it hasn't meaningfully improved since launch.

Specifically for google: allow users to block whole domains; I can already do that on my own mailserver, why can't I do that on Google's? Then, block mail from foreign countries -- or at least countries that I don't care about; I can block whole ASNs on my mailserver, why can't I on Google's? That then leaves only mail that I can bring legal action to.

Another iteration: when you "unsubscribe", then keep a record of it, and also show the history of emails that you've received from them on a confirmation dialog. Show me anything interesting like purchases, warranties, appointments, etc. When confirmed, keep a record of it. Show me a list of _all_ of the things I've unsubscribed from. If email is still received, automatic report spam and block the domain. Oh, that means that mailing lists must come from the same domain that sales are made on.

Another iteration: a subscription should require a confirmation. Let the email server recognize the confirmation, and block emails whose unsubscribe links aren't in the list of confirmations. That means an unsubscription link should go to the same domain that a subscription was confirmed on.

That's just a few spitballed ideas. Spam reporting functionality is clearly iterable, but it hasn't meaningfully changed for decades. It's still primarily done through opaque "reputation" scores and little else.

I don't want "report spam" which doesn't give me feedback and continues to let spam onto the wire to my client, and isn't powerful enough to use to block bad actors from trivially getting to my inbox. I don't want to be expected to (and trained to) click on unverified links which take me to somewhere I don't recognize, and could take me somewhere malicious. I expect more from the largest email provider(s) in the world.

What happens- at scale and I have to believe deliberately- is the “checkout created” event with that flag set to true is considered as “opted-in” by the marketing automation platforms everyone uses, like Klayvio.

Even if you immediately un-check it, un-checking doesn’t trigger an unsubscribe event, since you never submitted the form in the first place.

And because your Shopify session is now shared across stores, your email address gets opted-into marketing just visiting a checkout page.

Since it’s usually opaque how “mark as spam” and “block” actually works, and since the origin of the mailing lists can be reconfigured any time.. I still feel like I’m endlessly spammed by all the assholes I have to do business with, or else I’m going to miss a bill or a flight.

I had to call them (!) since they didn’t even include an unsubscribe option as I was a customer (!!) and have the CSR delete my email address from their records — because apparently this happens routinely.

Companies routinely break the law in small ways at scale — and they should get the RICO hammer dropped on them for doing so.

California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population.

> overrepresention of Republicans

That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs.

And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote.

> this is from Citizens United

That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.

Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media.

Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.

As usual, I know it's trendy to say on HN the EU is killing innovation with all the regulations, and there is truth to that, but there is also great customer protection, which seems constantly violated in the US.

So yes, in the US, companies can flourish, but it seems the consumers are second-class citizens compared to companies.

That's why it's nice to have both: eventually, EU regulations leak out to the rest of the world, and the US innovations reach us.

We pay the price by having a weaker economy, they pay the price by having less dignity in their life, but there is eventually balance.

My friend group has mostly moved to texting or other messaging apps. Email is kind of like letters in the 90's..

It’s usually not newsletters for me, but small niche companies who sell very specific things and feel a weird urge to have a weekly newsletter. It’s like all they sell is 2 models of guitar capo, but they still feel the need to send me weekly updates on I don’t even know what.

The kind of things where I not only don’t want the emails, but I want to register that I feel I was misled when I signed up.

"Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania alone — the three states with the worst gerrymanders in the last redistricting cycle — accounted for 7 to 10 extra Republican seats in the House."

Re: Citizens... I don't even know where to start. Read about the McCain-Feingold Act. It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).

Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad - in fact, they have to offer them a slightly _below commercial market rate_! Weirdly, though, they are responsible for the _factual content_ of any ad they run. Election law is really interesting.

And of course, follow-up mails for abandoned carts are an optional setting too.

Sometimes an innovation needs critical mass to work - social networks for example. LinkedIn famously got big by being extremely aggressive on how they mined your contacts. You'd get sued to the moon and back in the EU for this behaviour.

LinkedIn is big now, it has established itself and no longer needs to be that aggressive. Any European player that tried to enter the market with a less aggressive stance had no chance - they never reached that critical mass.

My theory is it started by accident- if you get a notification that says, “this checkout, this email, agrees to marketing: true”, it sure reads like an opt-in, and it used to be reliable. But it’s not anymore, because your email is already attached to the checkout when its created.

“Agrees to Marketing” pre-dates the global Shop session by years, it’s plausibly an ecosystem bug; one with no real motivation to solve until customers start talking (more)

Some of us consider ALL marketing emails to be "spam", with the sole carve out being if the user consciously and actively opted in.

I have no problem with marketing newsletters existing if people enjoy receiving and reading them. But if you email me without my active solicitation then it's no different than a door to door salesman physically knocking on your door when you don't expect it and don't welcome the interruption.

I will happily concede that legal definitions may differ from my own. But on a personal level, I apply the "Hollywood principle": "Don't call me, I'll call you." If you call me (or email, or knock on my door, or mail me a physical snail-mail letter) and I'm not expecting it, and it is of a commercial nature, it's my definition of spam.

Yes it's very stupid.

My telco does as well, and I got a free Nintendo Switch from them for just having fiber internet that I would need anyway (the telco just owns the fiber, the ISP then goes over that open fiber, so I pay two different companies, it's the former that has the point program despite being the definition of a dumb pipe)

Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people would disagree with as "pretty clearly correct" and stating an alternative as if it is the only alternative, that is not what many people think the alternative would be, is only going to raise hackles. It's not going to spur any new thought or interesting dicussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#History

Which it is, but as the GP described, it's about a lot more than that.

I happen to think it was incorrectly decided - SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending. It would have left the door open to not-for-profit corporations still being free to spend money on e.g. publishing a book about a candidate within some date of an election, which is precisely what we want not-for-profit civic organizations (which are, you may recall, also corporations).

However, it really is "pretty clearly correct" that had SCOTUS simply ruled that "no corporation can <X>" (for various values of X), we would be an extremely different and probably much worse situation than we were before CU. Whether it would be worse than the one we're in post-CU is hard to say.

And to be clear, when I say suboptimal results I mean misery and death in large quantities.

It doesn't need to be black or white.

A country can have decent consumer protections without e.g. a tax policy that is hostile to startups. But many EU countries are seemingly uninterested in the latter — presumably because there are no votes in it.

it technically applies to anyone resident in the EEA and UK, as well as citizens of the EEA and the UK abroad

Regulation are a necessary balance, otherwise the innovators become so powerful they eventually concentrate all the power and privilege and make weaker people pay for it.

Chlorofluorocarbons were an innovation for some times, then we needed regulation to save our ozone layer. Industrial wouldn't have stopped using it.

It's a fine line, constantly moving, an nobody will never be perfectly happy about it.

It's not obvious how that would have made any difference when a for-profit corporation could just give the money it wants to spend to an aligned non-profit to spend it in the same way. Unless you mean to prevent them from donating money to the non-profit, but then where is a non-profit supposed to derive funding? "All political speech can be funded only by government grants" has a pretty clear conflict of interest, and you would then somehow have to deal with for-profit entities that inherently engage in political speech like newspapers and cable news networks. Why should Comcast/MSNBC or Fox be able to dedicate unlimited airtime to political advocacy but not Intel or Ford?

The Brennan Center is a left-wing think tank. They're basically describing the thing I already mentioned in partisan terms:

> "Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party."

> "Because of residential segregation, it is much easier for map drawers to pack or crack communities of color to achieve maximum political advantage."

In other words, if the geography is such that there are areas where one party is highly dominant (i.e. urban areas) and other areas where the other party is slightly dominant (suburbs) then if you draw districts in a natural way the second party gets proportionally more seats because they win a larger number of districts by a smaller margin. They're essentially complaining that those states didn't gerrymander the districts to favor the Democrats to offset the natural advantage of Republicans in the existing geographic population distribution.

But Congress isn't intended to use proportional representation and gerrymandering to force the number of party seats to match the popular vote is just disenfranchising people in a different way by ignoring the effect that has on the behavior of individual representatives. For example, what they're proposing would be a de facto ban on majority-black districts because one district which is 60% black and votes 65% for Democrats and another that votes 55% for Republicans would result in fewer seats for Democrats than two districts that are 30% black and both vote 55% for Democrats. And both of the Democrats in the latter districts would have to move to the right because they'd otherwise both be at risk of a Republican picking off enough moderates to flip the district.

> It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering.

It required them to spend the money in different ways, which mostly lock out smaller companies, meanwhile conglomerates buying news networks has been a thing the whole time.

> (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).

Political ads are ~1% of all ad spending and much of even that money goes to the likes of Google and Facebook. Meanwhile it means non-media companies that want to air a political message can do it directly instead of having to do so indirectly by allocating more of the other 99% of ad spending to traditional media companies to curry favor and provide leverage to get favorable coverage.

It also dilutes the power of media companies, because the media company is not going to air coverage contrary to their own political interests no matter how much you run non-political ads with them, whereas someone who has a contrary interest can now run ads on social media.

> Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad

But it prohibited most entities that wanted to run those ads from doing it.

Suppose Comcast and AT&T don't like network neutrality and Amazon does. So Comcast buys MSNBC and AT&T buys CNN, gears them even more to viewers in the party that had been advocating it, but suppresses advocacy of the issue they're on the other side of to shut off support. Should Amazon now buy their own network? Is that better than letting them run Facebook ads? What if the EFF or some non-teracorp like Digital Ocean support network neutrality, but can't afford to buy a major network?

I'll ponder them carefully, and may respond in a day or so.