On 19/4/2019 15:14, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
Some of us knew that doing anything other than accept/reject was a
very bad idea many years ago. Everyone should know it now. It has
become obvious on inspection by even the casual observer.
I see your point but I do not completely agree. I feel that, at least
when you pay for your inbox, you should be able to have a classification
system/spam filter somewhere and be able to configure it or turn it off.
However, for freemail providers it's a different issue.
Freemail providers are providing the users with a
filtering/classification service which the users do not actually
control. It's a cognitive dissonance at the basic level: as a user, I
sign up to a free service and expect to control my mail but in practice
I realize that actually I don't. However, the concept of free email has
been hammered into me so much that I just lie to myself and fumble along
instead of actually paying for email. It's like social media, everyone
expects it to be free but there is no such thing. It's just a sub-par
service and it's poisoning the whole ecosystem and everything around it.
As a freemail user do I control my incoming mail or not? If I do, I
should be able to know and specify with 100% certainty what any filter
will block/allow by twiddling knobs of varying complexity. If I don't, I
am forced to always have to check inbox, junk, spam, ads, commercial,
transactional, quarantine and whetever else folders for my legitimate
mail to accommodate the whims of a hidden gatekeeper. Which is a
drudgery and I doubt anyone can contest this is happening. Nobody I know
that depends on email trusts that it is being reliably delivered to
INBOX, especially in hotmail accounts. It's login->click inbox->click
junk->manually filter->logout. Still, very few actually decide to pay
for email because they have bought the snakeoil.
I think we have a situation where just removing the junk/etc folders
would probably be a better user experience than the one they get now for
a lot of users. However, this will break the freemail providers'
business model (and servers probably). They have a business interest to
promote this cognitive dissonance, which they do by passing the burden
of deliverability to the senders and offering sub-par, opaque spam
"controls" and non-existent customer service to both them and users.
How about letting users know which emails were completely dropped? Nah,
scale (and a total red pill for users against freemail).
How about the ability to search in the spam filter's logs for a specific
sender within a date range to see if a sender you expect mail from
actually sent it but it was dropped? Nah. Business model.
How about allowing users to turn off filtering completely? Nah, scale
and business model.
How about whitelisting specific senders allowing filter bypass based on
a set of specific criteria? Nah, scale and business model.
How about identifying a change to the level of trust of the spam filter
in the UI so users can be alerted to a developing situation for their
legitimate senders/domains in their whitelist? Nah, scale and business
model. Better if the sender has to jump through hoops for this and even
then providers have no incentive to invest in this (senders are *not*
their clients).
I think I see a pattern here.
Hopefully once people start to catch on to social media toxicity and how
selling yourself for "free" is a very bad deal, maybe we'll be mature
enough to notice the parallels to "freemail" and see some pushback.
Before that happens, I'll just keep worshipping at the hotmail
deliverability bot altar and bleeding customers like Chris Woods
described until I just lose the will to live and move on to steak
grilling which has clearly defined methods for getting things done. Oh,
wait a minute....
--GM
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