Sounds like they want to be marked as spam
I’m pretty sure this against FCC regulations.
I’ve been wondering this myself so I just went ahead and read the FCCs CAN-SPAM business compliance guide.
This is 100% a violation. As per section 7:
You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request
OP could probably threaten a lawsuit and their practices will change quickly. That’s assuming the company does business in the US…
edit: just realized this is stubhub. this smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen
There you have it.
When I’ve been in OP’s situation, I filed a complaint with the FCC, performed a whois lookup on their site to send emails to the abuse/spam emails of their DNS registrar and host and inspected the email headers to email their email provider’s abuse/spam account(s). I’ve not yet had cause to reach out to my attorney general’s office when I’ve had a company violate CAN-SPAM, but it’s an option.
I also make sure each company knows there’s a pending CAN-SPAM complaint. I keep it convivial, but serious. “Hey, just letting you know that one of your clients is violating your terms of service and the law! A complaint has already been lodged with the FCC. Toodeloo!”
That bit of knowledge tends to shift the interpretation of your complaint from “annoyed nerd” to “someone politely informing you that you’re going to get skull fucked by the long dick of the law if you don’t fix this ASAP”It may sound sort of excessive, but I’m a bit of a consumer rights absolutist.
That last paragraph is art
I’m currently fairly ill (likely RSV, if the expired COVID tests are to be believed) and this is day 6 of moderate to severe insomnia.
A state of semi-delirium must be a good look for me, because I have received more complements on my writing in the last 3 days than I have in the last several years.
Get well soon!
A state of semi-delirium has given us some of the greatest artists the world has ever seen. Just look at Stephen King. Or Picasso.
deleted by creator
Stop licking public restrooms, it’s not worth it!!!
Seriously though, I hope you feel better soon…
The registrar can’t really do anything, and the service they use to receive email (what you’d see in the DNS MX record) is often totally different to the service used to send marketing emails. You’d need to look at the
Receivedheaders of the email to figure out where it was sent from. For example, a lot of companies use Office 365 or G Suite for corporate emails, but something like Mailchimp or ConstantContact for marketing emails.So, here’s my reasoning -
Inspecting the headers will let you see where the email came from - if it came from MailChimp, then you email the MailChimp abuse folks, who can apply their abuse policies. And the DNS registrar has the keys to the kingdom. Many registrars have terms of service that forbid using their service for spamming. That ought to include emails associated with the domain, no?
In the end, there’s a high likelihood of no real action being taken (not without a volume of complaints), but if the righteous wrath feels righteous, do its outcomes have to be righteous?
deleted by creator
Assuming of course that the FCC is interested in skullfucking small fry. I kinda doubt that.
Shh! We’re supposed to ignore that nearly all power is granted by fiat, and the government hardly enforces its duties to the common citizenry. It’s merely the threat of enforcement that keeps people in line.
Even your local police on the front lines have no legal obligation to protect and serve individuals. Instead they use their individual judgment and discretion. Good luck with the government itself!
This made me happy. Thanks!
This is also why companies include their mailing address in the footer of emails - it’s one of the other requirements.
You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days.
Oh, this explain why they say “may take up to 10 business days.” Why do they have two weeks to remove a name when it can be done near-instantly? It’s not like a person is manually removing every single name that opts out.
Are single page apps considered one page?
I’d say no since it is how pages are loaded and those likely interpreting the law including the user see a visual page change / transition it it would be considered another page since they’d likely not understand what SPA is.
More generally, are single page apps legal? And if yes, why?
Because they are useful and provide a good experience to most users
Block, report spam/phishing
Maybe I am ignorant, but report to who?
I guess below in another comment that was answered. Send it to their registrar.
With a lot of people using free email services, most have some report button. What this does is flag the specific email as potential spam that you specifically do not want to see. With enough people doing that, the probability of the email and subsequently the source domain being spam and spam generators goes up. High probability means the emails may end up in the spam folder without hitting your inbox.
There’s a bit of fine tuning email marketing can do to mitigate that, like not sending emails too frequently. But that’s not a passive thing they can do, which is why there are teams devoted to email marketing specifically at some companies.
The worst thing for a marketeer is to be dumped in spam. No one will ever see it or any future emails.
Yeah I had to do this to a couple lists because I have a very simple email address that gets added to things all the time, but if it’s really irritating to unsubscribe, I just click my email settings to report spam or fishing, and that usually creates an automatic filter for that center so you never get bothered again.
You can manually create a filter in the settings to send all their messages to trash or spam if you want as well.
Yeah, I would have to report it to the sender. I don’t use any of the large public emails like yahoo, Google, or microsoft.
The instructions also list an FTC form for you to use.
Yeah any emails that don’t have a simple Unsubscribe link, just hit Report Spam. It’s surprisingly common.
I just report spam and block these types. It’s a them problem, not a me problem.
If it has been particularly frustrating for me, I’ll even go out of my way to block the whole domain.
Report spam and block. They’ve lost emailing privileges.
I’ve seen many a clutched pearl at the suggestion of doing this.
Fuckin, if it’s a problem for me to treat emails I don’t want like that, then they need to stop sending so goddamn many. I get maybe 5 emails a week in actually looking for, and that’s extremely generous. 5 a month would be just as believable.
I probably get 100+ emails a week.
Think of your inbox as a garden. You must tend your garden or weeds will spring up.
The only ones upset at your approach are the problem anyway.
100/week? I just checked my personal and work inboxes for yesterday (Jan 2), and recieved 93 emails.
I have had 35 so far today (its 9.30am in my time zone)
That’s one of the most unethical ways to have users unsubscribe, and it’s done on purpose.
Companies who do that should get DOS attacked until their email infrastructure crumbles.
Everyone to their stations!
Mark it as spam.
Mark as spam. Simple
Are there any lawyers taking on cases like this? Cause I’d consider donating to a patreon if someone was out there fighting the good fight
Welp I do appear to be wrong.
What standing do they have?
The spam act says they need a functioning unsubscribe link to be compliant, judging by what OP said the link worked and the company wants to verify the account before unsubscribing.It should not ask for more information than the email address also it should be on a single page or a single email reply.
This is why I use a random email for every service that I can simply turn off on my end if they don’t behave.
You can also create aliases on most sites by adding a + and a suffix to your email
eg. Register with the site name
And then if you get fed up just set up a filter to put everything that comes to that specific address into the trash
But the thing to do is that if they dont send you a link that automatically undubscribes you is to mark it as spam
A lot of services won’t let you use the +, and it’s also trivial to get rid of the extension with Regex.
You can also create aliases on most sites by adding a + and a suffix to your email
You can never disable those aliases, though. The best you can do is write a filter that sends them to trash. With a good email alias system, you can actually disable an alias, so that emails to it just bounce back.
Many services just strip out everything at the + so I instead have a catchall account use email addresses like
sitename@example.com. For addresses that start getting spam, I add them to a config in rspamd that bounces them. (I self-host my email server)
Seems like they’re going to be blacklisted from Gmail if they continue like this. From February all mass mail directed to Gmail need to have single click unsubscribe or they’ll ban the server and reject all mail (even legit mails)
This is where you say you are living in the EU and have the right to be removed
https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/individuals/know-your-rights/right-erasure-articles-17-19-gdpr
Also copy paste this example letter
https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/
I got an email that was spam/marketing for one of my accounts. This is a copy paste:
This notification email has been sent to you as part of your REDACTED benefits. You will continue to receive these benefit notification emails even if you have requested not to receive commercial emails for this account.
Needless to say, I simply called and cancelled my account. When asked why, I told them that I don’t want spam emails from them for marketing or for “benefits”.
Without knowing the details, it’s hard to say. Yes this could be a spam tactic but various industries have laws saying they have to contact their users/clients/customers if they make a change- e.g. your bank has to notify you of new charges.
Not a defense of someone using this to scam, but an explanation of why that language might be used if legitimate.
It was for them having a sale and giving me an extra $50 off if I use my card.
It’s called StubHub because this feels as bad as stubbing your toe.
Recently Gmail has had a big pretty unsubscribe button at the top of all my emails like this.
This means that the sender includes a list-unsubscribe header, which is supported by a lot of email clients. Not sure if StubHub does this, but it’s worth checking.
Most providers that adhere to the CAN-SPAM act should have a List-Unsubscribe header since they generally allow unsubscribing either by clicking a link or by sending an email.
