Tell HN: Stop sending unsolicited emails to developers GitHub email
Number of emails I'm getting for developer related products and surveys based on my Github email is increasing.
Those emails never go to the "Promotions" or "Updates" tab of Gmail and make it directly into my Primary inbox
If you're working on developer related products and using Github emails as a marketing target you should stop! Those emails are not meant for marketing.
Edit: Today I learned you can set your email to a noreply email provided by Github[1][2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553451
[2] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-email-preferences/setting-your-commit-email-address#setting-your-commit-email-address-on-github
81 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI've recently starting calling out such companies. A couple of cases:
- Diffgram - Questioned how they received my marketing consent on their community slack chat, along with another user, got banned. - Buildable - Called out the founder on Twitter and was blocked in response.
While calling out seems just to result in being silenced/blocked, my hope is that it puts pressure on those companies, and others observing, to not market in this way.
* GenDocu - Jared Madden. Something gRPC related
* Steven Zhou - PhD student in organizational psychology at George Mason University
* Elliott Ash and Swagatam Sinha -- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)
But I'll point out: these are graduate or PhD students, traversing language and etiquette boundaries, under pressure from their advisors to acquire the data they need to publish (or perish). I wish they wouldn't do it (and that their advisors would nudge them away from pointless surveys), but naming individual students isn't really calling out the bad actors here.
Given the volume of emails I get (and their disproportionate sources from a handful of the same universities) over 5+ years, I'm inclined to believe that there are a handful of advisors that push their students to do these surveys as "easy" research.
If they're trying to build a startup and sell you that startup that's different, but you don't seem to be listing startups you seem to be listing researchers.
If you want to talk about tech sales people with no respect for boundaries desperately willing to do anything to sell you something you don't want and don't need - then yeah, lets rage against that. I've been in a role where I became a target for tech SDRs and it was absolutely miserable. My phone wound up in a sales database and I came very close to changing my phone number (a number I've had for almost 20 years). It stopped when I left that role - thankfully. The last year I was in it, in particular, once they got a hold of my phone number was miserable. Multiple sales calls a day, my work inbox snowed under, often 3+ outreaches followed by a phone call. One SDR emailed me 6 times, called me, I chewed him out on the phone and then he emailed me again. I blocked his email and then instituted a policy of silently marking any 3rd outreach as spam. I wish phones had a similar feature.
It's infuriating.
Sometimes you end up thinking you're double booked randomly and have a momentary panic while figuring it out. Other times it prevents legitimate people from scheduling time with you because your calendar has a bunch of slots blocked off by spam meetings.
Are they just scheduling a random call so they can lecture you about their product for 30 minutes?
The vast majority of email addresses are not meant for marketing. Marketing people could not give a toss about this fact, and most of them are impervious to calls for empathy so pleading them to stop them going whatever they want is a waste of breath/typing.
The only time a cold caller ever got anywhere was when I worked with him in a previous capacity and he reached out to me as the salesperson for a product we were already evaluating and considering, and at that point he really just came in to do a demo.
How do you addict a salescritter to spamming and cold-calling?
Sure there are good honest reputable people out there, but every time I find out someone works in marketing I always lose a little bit of respect for them. And do not give me that bull crap about how "well we just help inform consumers of their choices and raise awarness." That may have been true 50 years ago when the whole family would gather around a radio to tune in to the lone ranger, but these days I probably have an email in my inbox for a company that has the flipping cure for cancer, but I will never know because marketing parasites grab every channel of communication they can find and saturate to the point of uselessness and we end right back up where we were before where the only information I trust is information from people I personally know. So congratulations marketing you've managed to regress society back to the point where my best bet for finding something to solve my problem is consulting the village elder.
Engineers get blasted all the time for building crap that is bad, just check out the other thread on spyware that was posted, how about we start holding these marketing con artists accountable for the sh* they sell then.
For your Monday catharsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuSOaenJ4rbROEqpAew6ULXJf...
What I'm trying to say is, marketing in its current incarnation is a symptom, not a cause.
It's not a coincidence that we outsource all manufacturing to the cheapest bidder. Deforestation, acid oceans, wars for oil, kayfabe geopolitics, the anthropocene extinction, and all the other shit you'll never hear about on corporate news - they have the same root cause, which I think can be called late-stage capitalism.
Also, in places like California no one is going to jail for graffiti.
> Deforestation, acid oceans, wars for oil, kayfabe geopolitics, the anthropocene extinction, and all the other shit you'll never hear about on corporate news - they have the same root cause, which I think can be called late-stage capitalism
Thats an assertion you believe in. China has roughly 1/6th the global population, is communist controlled and has the same issues.
Funnily, your sibling comment is praising China for being communist. So, what is China? Is it communist when good and capitalist when bad?
The reality is communism always in life ALWAYS devolves to corrupt capitalism or a dictatorship and yet advocates and fans believe irrationally that next time will be different due to "reasons."
Corrupt capitalism is simply capitalism without anything else to dilute and aim it.
In that case: i once read (in a different thread on a different site) that china has an emperor. Checkmate.
To the one person who legally owns that space, there is that difference.
To literally everybody else, the difference is that one is trying to make me buy some stupid shit, and one is trying to capture my interest by artistic merit.
> Thats an assertion you believe in. China has roughly 1/6th the global population, is communist controlled and has the same issues.
Oh? How many wars did China start for oil in the past 20 years? Did they spend 6 trillion dollars on interest alone for illegal "wars on terror"? Are they trending down, or up? How's their manufacturing base? ... And who exactly are they exporting all their cheap goods to, in a very capitalist manner?
And - please digest this fully - just because our late-stage capitalism has a hand in the issues I named, for us, that doesn't mean that I support China, or communism. That's so clearly a false dichotomy. I think it's an example of an artificial talking point, created by cynical think-tanks and spread by corporate media.
Thats all that matters. Art is relative. Nobody is forcing you at gunpoint to buy stuff.
> Oh? How many wars did China start for oil in the past 20 years?
20 is an arbitrary number. Look at Tibet, Indo-China wars, Uyghur suppression. I think we should revisit that statement when China acquires a blue water navy.
> that doesn't mean that I support China, or communism
No one said that. If you say only X is responsible for Y, then you should then explain why Z (where, X!=Z) is also causing Y.
X=capitalism
Y=horrors, real and imagined
Z=communism
Similar phrases include socialist, fascist, nazi, communist, racist, sjw, or pretty much anything else. Labels are designed to try and short circuit rational thought, in favor of emotion provoked by association.
It's not ideal, but it should start to impact their ability or willingness to send out cold unsolicited sales messages.
I understand someone might want to contact me, so I have alternative contact instructions on my GitHub profile, but no one has ever done so.
I don't like email marketing either, but when on the public internet you kind of accept existing in public. You already use a (buggy) solution to navigate around your dislike in acceptance of what being in public entails.
Perhaps moving your patronage to a vendor more concerned about producing quality, stable, and long lasting software is in order?
Per the de facto weak car analogy, this is like asking the guy on the sidewalk flipping a business sign around in a creative fashion to go back inside because his Ford has known issue with the breaks, with no present fix, that may cause him to intersect with the guy on the sidewalk.
Perhaps the law should take sidewalk sign flippers off the street. Perhaps one should take the sign flipper to small claims court should they crash into him when the breaks do fail. But that's beyond the topic at hand.
You could have always started a new thread if you had a new topic to discuss. Why hijack an unrelated discussion where nobody cares about your pet subject?
> but when on the public internet you kind of accept existing in public
I do not accept this
But DON'T blind pitch them via their github email. This is spam.
However, you CAN try to start a conversation with someone and learn about the problems they face. "I saw your email in a commit about X, I am working on Y, want to learn more. Can I ask you [insert specific, targeted and thoughtful question]?" If you have a conversation like a real human, and they actually have the problem you are solving, then it's appropriate to mention your tool.
It turns out if you're actually solving someone's problem, they want to talk to you.
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
Non-response is a fucking response. Is that data that DataDog doesn't have? Because DataDog seems to think it's fine to harass people relentlessly and call their personal cell phones.
Why would a company like DataDog act like such an asshole to someone they want money from?
Because it's a numbers game. These companies scale their cost base and need to make up the difference in more sales. From the sales-person point-of-view, it seems reasonable to reach out to someone and ask if they need X/Y/Z but, of course, it is only reasonable when you don't have 100 other people doing the same thing every day.
As others have said, actually sometimes I am looking for X and someone happens to cold call and offer it so I buy it (not me, but some people do). So it works. I do think that there should be some way of opting out though like using the UK's TPS system.
They've emailed several times. I've not responded. In what universe does that mean, "I just need to call him, he's clearly lonely and wants to hear a voice."
I wonder how fast spam would cease if that became the default behavior of mail clients. Spammers would need to manually wade through literal seas of garbage to find the one mail that's actually a legitimate reply.
Here's a fraction of the spam I received last week:
> Dear Friend, I am Alli Ibrahim,I hope you're doing well and keeping yourself safe from the Coronavirus pandemic. I have a good business proposal for you. There are no risks involved and it is easy. Please reply for briefs and procedures. Best regards, Alli Ibrahim
> Hello would you be interested for us to be Partners in business in your country? Regards, Roseline Eribe from London.
> Hi <redacted>, I saw your profile online and wanted to reach out! You might be a great fit for many of the remote software engineering roles that top U.S. companies are hiring for on Turing.
> Hi <redacted>, I am looking for a possible tie up with a business or individual in your country so I can make some investments. Please, advise on investment opportunities in your country. Looking forward to your response.
> Hello Dear, I am Ivanov a Bulgarian, I have a business which I would like to discuss with you because I will be visiting your country soon. Let me know if you are Interested i will brief you in details.
+ about a dozen mails from adtech companies wanting to smear their shit over my property.
It's an email service/mailbox, let's call it inboundmail.com. You create your personal email there, let's say hash872@inboundmail.com. Every time you receive unsolicited spam to your 'real' Gmail or what have you, you respond with back with a stern GPDR/CCPA request that they delete your Gmail- and replace it with your unique, @inboundmail.com address. Within Inbound you can create any rules that you like to filter, block etc. This becomes your new 'public' address, like a Google Voice for email. Recruiters can spam you here, and so on. Revenue model? You charge senders to send x number of emails to inboundmail.com a month- the same way LinkedIn does.
In fact, speaking of LinkedIn- you could replace your personal email on file with LinkedIn, with your Inbound one. All LinkedIn messages get filtered to Inbound! Then you can sort, filter, auto-reply, block etc.
Could spammers just ignore Inbound and keep spamming your Gmail? Maybe, but I see the world going in a more regulated direction with GPDR/CCPA that makes this untenable. Once companies start paying some real fines, it'll be more difficult. 'Thanks Mr. Recruiter- please send future JDs to my Inbound email address', etc. You're in control. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
> you respond with back with a stern GPDR/CCPA request that they delete your Gmail- and replace it with
You can demand the data be removed but that's pretty much where it ends. There's not really any legal backing to demand that your data be replaced with other, specific data.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/
"Please do not contact with job offers or surveys not related to Internet Buttplugs."
And yet, I've only gotten 1, maybe 2, emails that relate to said topic. Everything else has nothing to do with it.
This is unconscionable.