For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop.
Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an address when you un-mark it as spam.
It's as if they intentionally want to force their filter on you. Not that there's anything wrong with a server-side spam filter. One that puts a polite X-Spam-Score header so you can adjust the sensitivity client-side.
Looking at the contents of my spam folder, and knowing that they likely reject many more e-mails in the background, I'm pretty sure I'd drown if I ever tried to use such option...
Why are you doing this? If you subscribed to something, do the responsible thing and unsubscribe from it. Don't fuck up spam filtering just to be lazy.
I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.
No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?
The last time I had Facebook emails before I marked Facebook as spam every action which somehow concerned me on Facebook resulted in me getting a email and consequently flooding my inbox. Admittantly this was a few years ago when I finaly had enough of it so they might of gotten better but at one point they did.
Yes, I picked facebook as an example specifically because of their reputation for emailing you about everything. But I think you'll find that they tend to email you when other people do something that, in some sense, concerns you, not when you do something. (Remember the ancestor comment defining "solicited email" as email that responds to an action you take.) "This person just liked your comment" emails are plausible. "You just liked this person's comment" emails are self-evidently absurd, but they fall perfectly within the (spurious) definition of "solicited" that nitrogen wants us to believe in.
To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more.
(And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.)
Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.
This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help:
1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons.
2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to.
For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.
If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.
Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.
And that's why I said: "but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first."
If you signed up, then you opted in. Don't be lazy and mark things you signed up for as spam. I'm not understanding how people get email from Amazon that aren't customers, and how customers can't turn off everything but confirmations, which I know is possible, because I have.
> how customers can't turn off everything but confirmations
I'm a customer, I consider that opt out. You don't? I signed up for amazon, not their bullshit emails. That you consider the situation opt in shows they have you trained well.
Nice, ad hom, and I can't downvote your insulting comment! How about this: are you too lazy to uncheck a few check boxes? Because that's all it takes, and then you'll only get order and shipping confirmations.
Most Amazon email is spam. They send tons of promotional email to everybody that buys something there, with not even an opt-out option, and after you receive the emails, go to the opt-out link and uncheck it, they create new categories with you signed in by default. The GP is correct in marking amazon emails as spam, and I'll ask anybody that's considering stopping to keep marking it.
That said, this is no excuse for Google to mark their transactional emails as spam for people that clearly want to receive them. Google is just being lazy and doing a bad job. Even Yahoo gets that right, Google can do it too.
Speaking as a person who frequently buys from Amazon, I've never experienced this. (No, it's not that promotional email from Amazon is going into my spam folder. I have to check my spam folder semi-regularly because gmail keeps flagging perfectly legitimate email as spam.) The mail I get from Amazon is order confirmations and a newsletter that I specifically signed up for. What's this promotional email that you're talking about?
I can't help but notice that all of those come from amazon.co.uk. As evidence-free speculation, perhaps there's a problem at a lower level than "Amazon the company". This sort of thing would certainly help explain why some people are extremely upset about spam from "Amazon" and other people are taking the position "you're crazy".
You signed up to be their customer, and you can turn these off. That they do this by default isn't ideal, but it's not spam - you have a business relationship with them.
just because i signed up for amazon.com, doesn't mean they get to spam me crap because they've buried a 2pt font unsubscribe feature that may or may not work over the course of a few weeks.
I call bullshit. I'm a very regular Amazon customer, and I neverever receive anything but order and shipping confirmations from them (and the occasional interview offer). Can't remember if I did anything special (like uncheck a few boxes), but I'm very sure it's possible to not be spammed by them as my inbox is proof.
Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an address when you un-mark it as spam.