Big Companies Shouldn't Be Exempted from Spam Filters
Email services whitelist big, reputable senders of email like Amazon, Atlassian and others. The mental model is that there are some reputable senders and some spammers, like Nigerian scams and Viagra pills. You come up with policies to separate the two. For example, is there an unsubscribe link in every email? Is the sender trying to pretend they’re someone else? Based on these policies, you separate the good from the bad guys. Once a company is classified as good, even if a million people mark (say) Amazon’s emails as spam, other users of the email service will see Amazon’s mails, because Amazon is a reputable company, or so the thinking goes.
This thinking may have been fine two decades ago, but it has broken down by 2022. Email has been weaponised to steal our attention. No company is reputable: I get spam from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Even small, opinionated companies like Basecamp that rail against the evil giants have started spamming me once they get my email ID. Companies have also found loopholes like auto-checking the Subscribe me to spam box. This is always the problem with policies: people will always look for loopholes, and succeed at finding them, because there are so many more people gaming the system than there are people building the system.
Instead, we need to adopt a stastical approach: if X% of people receiving email from a particular ID mark it as spam or block them1, then that email ID should be blacklisted, which means their emails go to spam for all users of that email service.
Not just the people who marked it as spam: If future emails go to spam only for people who’ve marked one of their prior emails as spam, the system fails, because there are thousands of companies out there that spam you, and you can’t block them one by one. If other people have identified a company as spamming, you should benefit from that.
If a sender from a domain is blocked, it should reduce the reputation of the domain itself. For example, I get spam from different people from my bank. Blocking individuals doesn’t help, because they’ll just send spam from another individual’s account.
This is a result-based definition of spam, not a policy-based definition. It’s spam if recipients think it’s spam. After all, recipients are the only ones whose opinion matters. If a spammer asks an email provider what they can do to prevent their emails from going to spam, they’ll answer, “Stop sending emails that your recipients don’t want.” Currently, email services like Gmail have guidelines like “Don’t include promotional content in purchase receipt emails.” This is prone to abuse — companies can easily split it into two emails. Instead, companies should be made to sit in the hot seat and made to figure out how not to annoy their users. That will solve spam much better.
Blocking should have a higher weightage than marking as spam. That is, if 10% of people reporting an email as spam is sufficient to block a company for all users, maybe 5% of people blocking them should be sufficient them to block them for all users.