Ken Magill covered this issue today in his newsletter

[Neil]

see http://www.magillreport.com/Ideally-Your-Email-Would-Expire

"“It’s been well documented that people who click ‘this is spam’ often
don’t even know why they’re doing it.” - Josh Baer

I responded with the following comment:

I would challenge Mr. Baer to provide this wellspring of
documentation.

I can easily counter it with the two years of professional end-user
experience surveys MAAWG.org undertook that showed very clearly and
precisely that they know full-well what they are doing when they hit
the 'this is spam' button.


Some folks log in infrequently. An unwanted message, despite it having
been delivered in the past, doesn't make it any less unwanted. Under
this scheme, senders are merely trying to skew reputation numbers in
their favour by removing the end-users' ability to complaint about the
crap sent to them.

See:
http://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2010_MAAWG-Consumer_Survey.pdf
and http://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2009_MAAWG-Consumer_Survey-Part1.pdf
and http://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2009_MAAWG-Consumer_Survey-Part2.pdf

[Ian Ragsdale]

Can we avoid getting into this particular discussion? Whether the spam button is the best or most appropriate way to revoke permission to send someone email is certainly not the point here.

If your objection is that removing the message doesn't give the customer the chance to complain, because the customer was never annoyed by the message in the first place, that seems like a poor objection to me. Allowing the customer to be annoyed by the message so that they have the opportunity to complain seems like a worse customer experience to me, not a better one.

There is clearly at least one use case here (Groupon) where a customer has clearly asked for daily messages, which serve no purpose after they have expired. If there are other use cases, lets discuss them. If we have technical discussions, that's great too. Lets please not get caught up in discussions about what is or isn't spam, because we all know that will go on ad infinitum.

- Ian

[Neil]

Interesting. The idea is promoted as somehow related to being about
spam (insulting end-users who are too dumb to know what the TiS button
is for), but yet, we are not allowed to discuss how this technical
implementation will affect reputation, and the user experience?

Not likely.

Amazing how there is so much concern about 'a customer' (mythical, no
doubt) who wants Groupon messages to expire after a day, but isn't
that the same customer who is too stupid to know what the This Is Spam
button does? So do you respect them, or think they are too dumb? Can't
have it both ways.

Groupon, FYI, at this very minute is being discussed as having
undertaken some very sleazy practices (purchased lists, in one case),
so thanks for bringing them up.

Expiring messages before they are seen is interesting. it allows a
sender to front-end load the number of emails sent, without
complaints, thus is a weak and sleazy attempt to skew the
volume:complaint ratio, upon which many filtering decisions are made.
I don't think any mailbox provider or repute would buy into this sham,
but then, I've been wrong before.

On Feb 15, 3:26 pm, Ian Ragsdale <ianragsd...@otherinbox.com> wrote:
> Can we avoid getting into this particular discussion?  Whether the spam button is the best or most appropriate way to revoke permission to send someone email is certainly not the point here.
>
> If your objection is that removing the message doesn't give the customer the chance to complain, because the customer was never annoyed by the message in the first place, that seems like a poor objection to me.  Allowing the customer to be annoyed by the message so that they have the opportunity to complain seems like a worse customer experience to me, not a better one.
>
> There is clearly at least one use case here (Groupon) where a customer has clearly asked for daily messages, which serve no purpose after they have expired.  If there are other use cases, lets discuss them.  If we have technical discussions, that's great too.  Lets please not get caught up in discussions about what is or isn't spam, because we all know that will go on ad infinitum.
>
> - Ian
>
> On Feb 15, 2011, at 2:00 PM, Neil wrote:
>
>
>

> > seehttp://www.magillreport.com/Ideally-Your-Email-Would-Expire

>
> > "“It’s been well documented that people who click ‘this is spam’ often
> > don’t even know why they’re doing it.” - Josh Baer
>
> > I responded with the following comment:
>
> > I would challenge Mr. Baer to provide this wellspring of
> > documentation.
>
> > I can easily counter it with the two years of professional end-user
> > experience surveys MAAWG.org undertook that showed very clearly and
> > precisely that they know full-well what they are doing when they hit
> > the 'this is spam' button.
>
> > Some folks log in infrequently. An unwanted message, despite it having
> > been delivered in the past, doesn't make it any less unwanted. Under
> > this scheme, senders are merely trying to skew reputation numbers in
> > their favour by removing the end-users' ability to complaint about the
> > crap sent to them.
>
> > See:

> >http://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2010_MAAWG-Consumer_Surve...
> > andhttp://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2009_MAAWG-Consumer_Surve...
> > andhttp://www.maawg.org/sites/maawg/files/news/2009_MAAWG-Consumer_Surve...

[Joshua Baer]

Hi Neil,

Thanks for joining in the discussion. I'm looking through the MAAWG reports you linked for some data about false positives but I'm not seeing it. It's a long report so I probably just missed it - can you point me to the part where this documents that users don't ever accidentally click this is spam on the wrong message?

My comment was based on data that I've seen in the past about false-positive rates. I'll try to find some examples to share.

At OtherInbox we send about 10 million emails per month with almost no spam complaints. Letting messages expire won't do anything to skew reputation numbers for me, and that's not part of my motivation. OtherInbox has no commercial interest in this and will not benefit from it financially. 

My motivation is primarily as a consumer - I want my mailbox to clean itself up. Most of the emails that will expire are not spam and are not unwanted, they just are not relevant after a certain date so they might as well go away.

~Josh

On Feb 15, 2011, at 2:00 PM, Neil wrote:

I can easily counter it with the two years of professional end-user
experience surveys MAAWG.org undertook that showed very clearly and
precisely that they know full-well what they are doing when they hit
the 'this is spam' button.

[Ian Ragsdale]

I have seen no discussion about this proposal relating to spam, other than concerns about how spammers might take advantage of it to game the system. I do find that to be a useful topic of discussion.

It sounds like you have identified one potential way in which they could (expiring messages before people can complain). I question how useful it is, because people don't spam just to use bandwidth, they want messages to be seen (or they can't be effective). However, it is certainly worth considering if this is a way for people to game the system.

- Ian

[Mvern]

On Feb 15, 3:59 pm, Joshua Baer <joshuab...@otherinbox.com> wrote:

> My comment was based on data that I've seen in the past about false-positive rates. I'll try to find some examples to share.

I've seen numbers as high as 20% and as low as 5% are FP reports - but
consumers are getting smarter and these number are always changing and
vary from ISP to ISP. They also depend a lot on the latest UI design
change from an Webmail provider... New design and clear separation of
the "Junk vs Delete" buttons would likely go a long way to stopping
many false-positive reports.

Other data I have read in the past shows that the bulk of complaints
(90%+) show up in the first 48 hours of a campaign deploying.
Regardless that is not that point your making with this idea - this is
about expiring messages that are no longer relevant because of a time
limit being reached, so lets leave that out of the discussion.

> My motivation is primarily as a consumer - I want my mailbox to clean itself up. Most of the emails that will expire are not spam and are not unwanted, they just
> are not relevant after a certain date so they might as well go away.

Maybe it's just my opinion - but I don't want anyone making decisions
about which emails to keep in MY inbox and which ones to delete,
archive, move.

If the primary thought behind this is deal of the day type emails then
they really need to rethink their email model:

- maybe change the images or landing pages when the deals expire
- sell the items at full price and take a commission on the full
price sale if your late to the party

I'd see this idea better working on the outbound MTA, for example: If
you have not delivered before X-time bounce the mail. This way you
are not delivering yesterdays mail today when the deal has already
expired, ISPs don't have to do anything at this point the sender sets
the rules.

But never touch the mail once it's in MY inbox ... It's mine to do
with as I please at that point.

Matt
@EmailKarma

[Joshua Baer]

On Feb 16, 2011, at 8:51 AM, Mvern wrote:

> I'd see this idea better working on the outbound MTA, for example: If
> you have not delivered before X-time bounce the mail. This way you
> are not delivering yesterdays mail today when the deal has already
> expired, ISPs don't have to do anything at this point the sender sets
> the rules.
>

That's a _very_ interesting idea but I doubt it would be practical in the end. Most mail doesn't sit in the queue for days.

> But never touch the mail once it's in MY inbox ... It's mine to do
> with as I please at that point.

You should always have that choice. But you and I are email geeks and are not the average user. With OtherInbox we spend a lot of time working with less technical (and more common) people and they do want their email to "just take care of itself".

~Josh