Categories of email

The question came up on a mailing list about how senders classify email. Steve came up with the following list of email types from the recipient (not sender) perspective

• Transactional & Alerts
• Marketing
• Duplicates
• Duplicates
• Apologies for the preceding duplicate
• Just sending mail so you don’t forget us
• Opt-in confirmations
• Welcome messages
• COI challenges
• Opt-out confirmations
• Apologies and corrections to the broken URL in the preceding email.
• Notifications that we added you to this other list over here, seeing as you’re on this one
• Inscrutable blank messages
• Inscrutable messages that aren’t exactly blank but seem to consist solely of a broken image
• Other apologies, assorted
• Reconfirmations after we got blocked at AOL
• Different reconfirmations while we migrate to a different ESP, ‘cos the last one got blocked at AOL
• Reminders to add us to your address book, especially at AOL
• Cross-marketing for ISPs other than AOL
• Spam
• Mailing to our suppression list by accident
• Viruses
• Not really spam, honest, look, we have an unsub link