Indeed. If someone is going to argue credibly for treating everything from commercial sources as spam then they also need to explain how businesses can provide any information they are actively required to provide to their customers either by law or by whatever method the customer is using to pay them. In general the merchants have no say in this and the penalties for failing to provide the information can be far more severe than anything they're going to suffer for losing a few people who don't understand what spam is and abuse the mark-as-spam button when reading their mail.
It is their choice to pollute the channel they use to communicate with customers with spam. They don’t have to send spam, and if they offer the option they shouldn’t make opting out difficult or dark-patterned.
The problem is that there are people who will classify any unsolicited mail from any business they've dealt with as spam. And by "classify" I mean hitting whatever button they have in their email client that says so - which for online email services is likely to affect future processing of mail from related sources for themselves and potentially for others as well.
It doesn't matter to those people whether there was a quick and easy way to unsubscribe or change preferences. It doesn't matter to those people that they actively requested that kind of mail a few months ago and have forgotten. It doesn't matter to those people that they might end up blocking important messages they do want later. It doesn't even matter to those people that they're flagging information that is required by law to be provided to them. There is no nuance here. Got mail. Hit "spam". Done.
Some of these people even think that marking the transactional "thanks for your payment" mail as spam will somehow end their subscription to your service or get them out of a long-term contract early! Then they'll issue a chargeback that is also totally inappropriate and in violation of contract and claim that they gave notice to cancel by "unsubscribing" from the emails by marking them as spam.
Dealing with customer support for those people is not fun. In a perfect world it would go both ways and we could have a system that notified us of such behaviour immediately so we could choose not to do business with those people in the future. It is as sure an indicator of a customer who is not worth the trouble as I have ever found after people attempting actually criminal behaviour.
Spam is a difficult problem. Obviously a lot of senders really are abusing the recipients in ways that are not welcome and should ideally be stopped. But there are plenty of recipients abusing the senders of legitimate messages too.
> The problem is that there are people who will classify any unsolicited mail from any business they've dealt with as spam.
I'd agree if this was the edge-case, but the truth is that most businesses tend to lean towards sending more email than they need to, so overzealous use of the spam button is an expected reaction in response.
> which for online email services is likely to affect future processing of mail from related sources for themselves and potentially for others as well.
That's the system working as designed - if in aggregate most people signal that they don't want to receive a certain piece of mail or all mail from a certain sender, chances are I will agree with their decision.
> But there are plenty of recipients abusing the senders of legitimate messages too.
I'll be happy to change my mind once email becomes strictly opt-in and senders would err on the side of caution and the default is no email at all and you must explicitly opt into every distinct category of email, with the opt-in being located in the same annoying and hard-to-reach places as the opt-outs currently are.
That's not (yet?) the case, suggesting the spam button isn't being pressed enough. You're trying to guilt people about liberal use of the mark-as-spam button but you seem to have no issues with senders liberally using the "send spam" button.
You're trying to guilt people about liberal use of the mark-as-spam button but you seem to have no issues with senders liberally using the "send spam" button.
On the contrary. I dislike spam as much as the next person and I have never allowed my own businesses to engage in "common" practices I consider unacceptable even when that has almost certainly cost us money.
I'm just saying there are two sides to this story and extreme solutions in favour of either one side will probably have undesirable side effects for innocent parties.
