Tell HN: Login to unsubscribe is against Federal Law

I think start-up culture tends to be a bit unethical - we favor expedience and results over rules and regulations, and that's generally correct, but also leads us into murky territory.

The most important guideline might be this - build a company where you'd want to have any of the jobs, and where you'd want to be a customer. But specifically:

1) never send someone an email without explicit opt-in (make them check a box, don't start spamming just because they registered).

2) make it easy for a user to delete themselves from your database, entirely

3) make it easy for a user to port data elsewhere

4) don't make up fake email personages, or otherwise overtly lie to your customers

5) don't use misleading numbers for marketing or fundraising

6) give employees warning and/or severance when you plan to fire them

7) don't discriminate based on gender or sexual preference, even though it may be legal for small companies to do so in your locality

8) if you store financial or sensitive data, make security a priority

    When the email address is obtained in the context
    of the sale of a product or service, *the natural
    or legal person may use the email for direct
    marketing of its own similar products or services
    provided that customers clearly and distinctly are
    given the opportunity to object, free of charge and
    in an easy manner*, to such use of electronic contact
    details when they are collected and on the occasion
    of each message in case the customer has not
    initially refused such use.

By that logic, It would seem I'm also allowed to make you login to change the settings by which I notify you of these things. While it would be nice of me to provide such functionality to my site, it does not appear I am not obliged to do so under law.

I recommend everyone else do the same and if everyone did I think the fear of being put on gmail's global blacklist for spam would be a far more effective deterrent than the laws alone.

This happens often to me:

* Get email that I'd like to unsubscribe to

* Look for unsub info -- directed to "reply to this email" or, almost as bad, "enter your email address"

* Follow instructions

* Receive notice saying "Sorry, the email you entered [sent from] is not in our database"

Well thanks. We've gotten nowhere.

So the right way to design this should be a simple unsubscribe link w/ a unique token that executes the request upon clicking.

At worst, you can do what Constant Contact does and require the email address to be entered, but still provide a hint (i.e. "a....c@gmail.com"). This is still somewhat annoying, but I understand why they do it -- it likely reduces net unsubs since there's a second step involved. Pushing it, but thinking as a business owner as well, I get it.

(FWIW, I'm all for following laws that already exist, including this one, but frankly this was a stupid law to enact: spam is not a serious problem, and spam from a single specific bothersome recipient--the only kind this law could possibly affect--was never a problem (or at least hasn't been since the invention of the killfile, something that I am pretty sure predates my birth). What needed regulation was real physical mail--the kind that causes nearly infinite paper trash--and yet that seems to largely be ignored.)

Their emails still arrive and get filtered to my trash. They're still in violation with no simple way to unsubscribe.

Not only illegal, it is downright rude to establish gatekeepers like a login box to avoid getting me off that important newsletter.

Given any mail with this characteristic I will gladly report it as spam in the hope that the next guy won't have to deal with it.

LinkedIn and GetGlue both require logins to unsubscribe, so I mark their emails as spam and filter directly to trash. It works, but philosophically it still pisses me off...

The answer to that question might be enlightening.

More people need to do this.

In most cases, if an email isn't commercial in nature, it's excluded from the CAN-SPAM requirements. Now, whether or not it annoys your users is another discussion...

One relevant excerpt:

"These requirements do not prohibit transmission of “transactional or relationship” content. Even if a recipient opts out of receiving messages with a commercial primary purpose from a particular sender, that sender may continue to transmit other types of messages. Therefore, recipients who invoke their rights under the opt-out mechanism required by CAN-SPAM will continue to receive valuable “transactional or relationship” messages. This is important because transactional or relationship messages are communications that Congress has determined to be per se valuable to recipients."

How are we, for example, feeling about Linked In these days?