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Ask HN: Is there a blacklist of careless spam-reporters?

2 points by benp84 ↗ HN
My app's emails have recieved 10 spam complaints out of 11,000 sent, which has knocked my SendGrid reputation down to 85%, despite clearly marked unsubscribe links included at the bottom of every one. The posts I've read about how to reduce spam reports tell me to do everything short of a giant, flashing "UNSUBSCRIBE!!!" link at the top of all my user emails.

I'd prefer not to burden the other 99.9% of my users with prominent, ugly unsubscribe links or double opt-ins upon signup, for fear that one of these 0.1% of recipients will carelessly hit the spam button instead of unsubscribe. It would be great to have a service that would allow me to (a) report email addresses of users that have unjustly marked me as spam and (b) check a new user's email address against their database to find out if other app developers have had problems with that email. Then I could take measures to avoid sending those users any more email than necessary.

Does such a service exist?

3 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] thread
bediger4000
Do you have some criteria for "unjustly" getting marked as spam? Is that criteria objective, in that I can look at some app and decide that app is not spam without asking you if it's your app?

If you don't, I can't possibly see how anyone could implement this service.

benp84
I don't expect there to be much debate about conditions like "they gave you their email address on your website and your email has an unsubscribe link."

It obviously wouldn't be a perfect system, but neither is any reputation formula. And the consequences of being wrongfully blacklisted are incredibly mild: I'd just skip our follow-up emails, or maybe require blacklisted users to double opt-in.

stephp
By definition, spam is unsolicited. If someone gives a website their email address, and they are sent website-related content, it's not spam.

If the receiver doesn't like it, it's called email-the-receiver-didn't-like, and they can unsubscribe. Still not spam, though. Pretty simple?