Randy Cassingham's Blog

Posted by G in FL on August 9, 2008:

"For anyone to use the "This is Spam" button on mail they asked to get is despicable"

In most cases I would agree with you. But sometimes I sign up for a list, decide I don't like it, and then CAN NOT get them to remove me. Either their unsubscribe doesn't work, they don't provide one, or they make it so difficult to unsubscribe that I will not go through the process.

I may have initially signed up for those lists, but by making it impossible to get myself removed from them, they have made themselves into spam.

True, of course, does not fall into this category!

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I did cover that: "It's not 'spam' until you do AND the mailer doesn't honor your request". So yes, I agree: it is totally reasonable to mark thing as spam if you can't get them to stop -- even if you did ask them to start. -rc

Posted by Neil Schwartzman on August 9, 2008:

I did cover that: "It's not 'spam' until you do AND the mailer doesn't honor your request". So yes, I agree: it is totally reasonable to mark thing as spam if you can't get them to stop -- even if you did ask them to start. -rc

I know of circumstances where someone can sign up, and receive up to 15 emails or more per day ... and they aren't told that at sign-up. Is that spam? how about if they do that, but also hand over your email address to '3rd parties' who also slam you with email. Is that spam? Of course it is!

In any event, I'm told the TiT email wasn't blocked, but rather 'deferred' which is quite a different matter, and involves slowing down the delivery rates. This may have had something to do with True email, or due to a capacity situation at Yahoo!

All told, glad it worked out!

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Passing your address to a third party (so you get mail you didn't ask for) is definitely spam. But I wouldn't necessarily agree that getting more mail than you expected is; perhaps you simply weren't paying attention to what you were subscribing to. As long as there is an unsubscribe link that works, I wouldn't call it spam.

You can quibble about terminology of what happened to TRUE, but when they refuse requested mail week after week after week, it sure sounds like a "block" to me. -rc

Posted by Neil Schwartzman, Montreal Canada on August 9, 2008:

You can quibble about terminology of what happened to TRUE, but when they refuse requested mail week after week after week, it sure sounds like a "block" to me. -rc

Ah, but the terminology leads us to the underlying cause of the issue. A deferral is something your ESP Lyris can control, in terms of the rate of delivery and number of connections they open when they send mail to Yahoo!, and is entirely unrelated to the use of the This Is Spam button. It is speaking to their capacity or willingness to accept mail from a source or sources, for any number of reasons, like it being a spam source, or less than trusted sender, or, on the Yahoo! end, because they are being swamped with email.

Use, and 'misuse' of the TiS button can lead to blocks, or dropped deliveries, completely blackholed, or sent to the spam folder. An entirely different thing.

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I would certainly think Lyris, being a pretty big ESP, would be working with the big ISPs to know their preferences and such. But Lyris abuse folks are about as secretive is Yahoo abuse folks, so I don't really know the answer. I do certainly know that it's possible to throttle Lyris delivery rates by domain, though; that capability has been there for years. And it wouldn't be, if they weren't aware that it was needed.... -rc

Posted by Ken, Ventura, CA on August 9, 2008:

There are many issues with Yahoo related to spam. They sent a lot of spam, perhaps because I suspect that their advertisers pay based on the amount of email, so yahoo would get more money by sending the spam than by stopping it.

Yahoo also defers messages, which is really annoying and delays email for their users.

There is supposed to be a way to get on a whitelist, but that list is basically just for spammers and businesses, not places like schools where students forward their email.

It is impossible to get anyone to listen at yahoo. I have sent spam reports to them and often they reply that it did not come through their system, which is false since the server logs the last connection, which was a yahoo system. Add to that they contract with ISPs, like Verizon, so with those messages they claim no responsibility and refuse to do anything other than to tell you to contact the source.

AOL used to have a bad reputation and years ago was threatened with having the backbone sites refuse to transmit their email, but they now take spam seriously and you can actually call and talk to a person and get a good response. They have a feedback loop to prevent problems too. I wish that everyone would refuse to carry yahoo email until they cleanup their act.

Posted by Gordon, oregon on August 9, 2008:

the spam filters at JUNO.COM have a nasty habit of pulling similar antics.

i am signed up with several YAHOO groups. JUNO's spam filters will randomly block YAHOO groups and i have to go through a whole bunch of hoops just to get legit email back from YAHOO groups.

Posted by Michael, London on August 11, 2008:

Sadly enough, in every accumulation of people that gets large enough, like True, you get your share of less enlightened individuals, who can't read the instructions or who even misbehave on purpose.

On one side, having a common spam clue database for all users of a mail service might be quite neat, it can boost the recognition rate dramatically, on the other hand, a few misbehaving individuals can easily poison the data for everyone.

Posted by Jackie, Tacoma, WA on August 11, 2008:

Yes, I've had issues with Yahoo. EVERY single time that I can think of when I wanted to get email from a particular company, group, etc. (including changing my password, etc), it got blocked. Can all of those companies really be spammers? I'm sure they're not, considering that when I manage to get my email changed to another address, I have no problems with them. (I'm trying to make sure not to use my Yahoo account as my official email anymore, but every couple of months I'm in a hurry and forget.)

This even happened once when I sent MYSELF an email with information about a phone card company I wanted to be able to find again (although that fortunately was only sent to the Spam folder so I could get it back). Meanwhile, my yahoo mailbox is filled up with amazingly obvious spam. Sigh.

One other reason that some people may have marked This is True (and other similar emails) as spam... I know I've gotten several fake emails that were supposedly from some company I do frequent (say, Amazon). After reading them carefully I could tell they were spam, and so blocked them; however, if I got enough in a short time period I might continue blocking all of them just because I was getting tired of rereading the same message. Had Amazon (or whatever company/newsletter/etc) tried to write to me during that time I could conceivably have blocked them by accident. I try to be careful, but I know of at least once when I marked a real email as spam (although once I realized it I went back and marked it as non-spam... it could have happened on other occasions without me realizing it, however).

Posted by Pat, North Carolina on August 12, 2008:

I've had a couple of occasions where I have had to mark what should have been a legit email as spam (not yours!) when I tried to unsubscribe from the sites' "newsletters" and that didn't work. The "you are unsubscribed" message came up, but the email still kept coming day after day. So I looked for contact info on the sites in question, and I got no response after writing to them directly asking them to remove me from their lists. The sites' email was marked spam after waiting a week for a response of some kind. Their email still keeps on coming a year later, but now goes into the spam bin. With this kind of attitude on the part of some of these companies it's no wonder people get fed up and mark email spam even from companies that DO respect their wishes. Unfortunately their rude behavior affects even the best of email newsletters.

Posted by Laura, Columbus, OH on August 13, 2008:

For those of you who have att.net addresses, I think you'll find a decent amount of legit stuff gets stopped at the server. I was trying to get into my online banking and wasn't getting the confirmation code and couldn't figure out why. I requested it three separate times before I figured out that I needed to be looking on the server via webmail, not in my pop download. And, lo and behold, there it was. All three times. And I bank with Chase - apparently, chase.com is considered a spam address by AT&T. Best as I can tell, AT&T's spam filter is just as messed up as Yahoo's - which makes sense, since the one bought out the other. Now I check the server on ALL of my accounts at least once a month to make sure I don't miss anything.

Also, watch out for Hotpop. I had an account with them and they suddenly locked me out for 'inactivity'. Since when is pulling your mail every day considered inactivity? And now, due to the amount of mail I receive, I have no idea what I'm missing. Sigh. I'll figure it out eventually, but what a pain! I have to agree with Randy - Gmail wins hands down as the best e-mail service, better than some of the pay ones.

Posted by Mitch in Newark, CA on August 13, 2008:

Although I understand your frustration and anger, I would disagree that people which click on the spam link are "lying". I suspect that in most cases it was done by mistake. They still shouldn't do it, but any system that can't handle a few hundred mistakes among 100s of thousands of people is inherently brittle. Any email/spam system that can't handle mistakes isn't designed for humans, and needs to be redesigned.

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Just so. I'm well aware that mistakes can happen, and that it's part of the problem. But if more than a handful of the clicks are errors, I'd expect to get e-mails asking "Why aren't I getting TRUE anymore?" -- and "Why is the system not letting me subscribe again?" (because indeed, when someone reports TRUE as spam, they're not allowed to subscribe again.) In fact, such questions to me are extremely rare. That tells me that most of the clicks on the button are not mistakes, but rather being used in lieu of the proper unsubscribe process. And, yes, that makes me angry, because it not only affects me, it ruins things for thousands of people who do want the issues. -rc