Confirming spam reports

Someone floated the idea of having ISPs confirm that a user really wants to report a mail as spam every time they do so. The original poster was asking for comments and what we thought of such an idea.

The only thing I could think of is the poor woman who’s been gone for a week on vacation and is selecting large swathes of her mailbox and hitting “this is spam.”
She then gets mailbombed by her ISP with confirmation messages.
She then selects all the confirmation messages and reports those as spam.
Repeat until something breaks or she collapses sobbing in the corner because she can’t get all the crap out of her mailbox!!!

Asking users to confirm each spam report, either by an email or adding a second popup box is extremely user unfriendly. Users will demand a “confirm all” button, and never read the confirmation anyway.

Related Posts

Why offer a feedback loop?

Someone asked yesterday

What business advantage is there to an ISP in offering a feedback loop? I’ve never really seen one.

Read More

Did anyone actually look at this email before sending?

I received spam advertising AARP recently. Yes, AARP. Oh, of course they didn’t send me spam, they hired someone who probably hired someone who contracted with an affiliate marketer to send mail.
The affiliates, while capable of bypassing spam filters, are incapable of actually sending readable mail.

Read More

Spam from mainstream companies

Yesterday I wrote about spam I received advertising AARP and used it as an example of a mainstream group supporting spammers by hiring them (or hiring them through proxies) to send mail on their behalf.
My statement appears to have upset someone, though. There is one comment on the post, coming from an IP address allocated to the AARP.

Read More