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Tell HN: No, I won't enter my WORK email

21 points by patatino ↗ HN
What is it with this "enter your work email"? What do you care about which email address I use? There is only one reason to ask for it, to research the company and spam us.

I even saw services where I couldn't use my Gmail address, seriously? Yeah, I get it. You want to sell something, everybody does. But this triggers me hard.

I hope every service which uses this dark pattern to go out of business.

16 comments

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RicoElectrico
My company sends me a list of recorded webinars they made every once in a while. If I want to watch them, I have to fill this dreaded sales-lead-generator form, even though I'm their fucking employee... At least I don't have to follow any e-mail links afterwards and can jump right into the video.
Something1234
That sounds absolutely dreadful. Are you in consulting services?
RicoElectrico
No, I'm an engineer in a corp. To be fair, I've seen much worse forms, I'd rate this one 4/10 in terms of annoyance.

It's just that's very ironic ;)

carmen_sandiego
Anti-spam laws mean you can’t send unsolicited marketing to a personal email, but can to a work one. Hence the qualifier.

You can put your personal email. It just means they’ll have an out if you decide to report them, because you represented it as a work one.

patatino
That makes sense, but it looks like another annoying decision, like the cookie banners.
buffaloo
If only cults were required to follow this. The Mormons refuse to leave me alone. They call me. They email me. They have for years. Refuse to take me off their list.
airbreather
I found you engage with them a little, then show you have some core vlues/interests way outside their permissibles, and somehow appear to be looking you might "infect" their other members, then they leave you alone pretty fast.
buffaloo
I always knew deep down my gay cannibal drug addict nudist kleptomaniac gambler alter ego would one day come in handy... Thank you for the excellent advice.
LinuxBender
As a side note, in O365 and a few other mail providers, you can set it up to drop any email into your spam folder that is not from someone on your contacts. I get a lot of spam on my work email, but I don't open any of it. All of it ends up in the spam folder. No idea if gmail supports something like this.
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fmntf
There are some legit uses for this. Using a company email would give you automatic access to some kind of privileged account.
MikeDelta
Some of these software companies want you to use your work email so that they can go after your company after a while to pay licensing fees. The argument is that the software is only free for personal use and because you used your work email, it became commercial use. And because you used it for a while already, there are nonzero costs that your company needs to pay and cannot undo anymore. Not saying all companies are like that, but I have seen some do this.
coreyhn
The reason I’ve seen is that the domain on the email can be associated with the broader company account in CRM systems. This is used for lead routing, identifying an expanding interest within an org, along with getting more info about the company through lookup services for again lead routing based on size and location.
znpy
if i'm browsing www.someproduct.com and they ask me for my work email address to view a white paper i usually enter marketing@someproduct.com to view such document. it usually work.

last time i used this trick to view cockroach's cloud report (https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/2021-cloud-report/ -- scroll to bottom, click "Read The Report", try the trick yourself) and it worked. I hope they're annoyed as much as people are when they get spammed by them.

I kinda think this should become a standard practice.