In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email. If it's something I will be using for a long time or for specific purpose, I will bother fiddling with their email settings so I don't get overloaded. If it's a one-off or an app or something, I literally never want to hear from you. So I preemptively mark the first email as spam so I never have to see another one.

No, Runkeeper, I don't need an email when I set a personal record. You told me that in the app, literally as it happened. That's why I reported your email as spam and blocked everything you have to say to me. You're an app, you already have a way to contact me.

And here I was wondering why a few months ago legit emails that I asked for were starting to show up in my spam folder, including all the facebook emails I asked facebook to send me. (I don't log into facebook so if someone messages me or invites me to an event I'll need an email otherwise I'll miss it).

So now I have to check my spam folder emails regularly and put filter on the domains that end up there "no, don't send to spam filter."

Why can't you just use a filter instead of messing up other people's email?

Why should I have to create a filter when I never asked for the email in the first place?

If you're emailing me and I didn't ask you to, that's the definition of spam. Gmail has one button that does two functions. Report spam and unsubscribe. There's no way to have Gmail automatically unsubscribe you from a third party list without also reporting spam, so that's the only option I have. (On a side note, Facebook is something I use quite often so I have my settings there tuned to never send me an email. So your Facebook woes are not because of me, at least).

Mosquitoes serve a purpose as well, but I won't apologize for using a fly swatter.

In Gmail - Click on "more" then "filter messages like these" as so - http://i.imgur.com/OdJpKoE.png and set messages from that sender to be automatically deleted.

That neither marks it as spam nor does it unsubscribe me from the list. 99% of the time the message falls into at least one of those categories, and 99% of that, they fall into both spam and something I want to unsubscribe from.

I don't need three or four clicks to get rid of troublesome emails that I never asked for. Gmail has a handy "report spam" that covers 99.99% of every unwanted email I get.

> In many cases, as soon as I see the welcome email, I hit report spam to block any further email.

What the hell? This is crazy. Reporting an email as spam does not just protect you from receiving further emails, it reduces the reputation of the sender and makes it less likely their emails will get through, even to other customers who want them.

It would be like walking through a bookstore, deciding not to buy anything, then reporting them to the Better Business Bureau as a scam. You are making things worse for everyone else, as a matter of personal convenience.

> What the hell? This is crazy. Reporting an email as spam does not just protect you from receiving further emails, it reduces the reputation of the sender and makes it less likely their emails will get through, even to other customers who want them.

LEARN TO USE OPT-IN. Learn to confirm that opt-in. Resist the urge to send unsolicited bulk email just because you have some tenuous "previous business relationship".

We're talking about a transactional email, not marketing.

Let's say you create a free account at GitHub. GitHub sends you an email to confirm the account creation. This guy marks those as spam. It makes no sense.

Yup. Just like using Adblock hurts companies who have decent advertisements on their site, not just abusive advertisers. For sites I frequent that do not have abusive advertisements, I make exceptions for them in AdBlock. Otherwise, everything gets wiped out, on every site. If you're caught in the swath of the innocents, sorry, but I'm not sorry.

Long ago, companies, startups, blogs, etc, declared war. They decided that their readers, their users, their customers aren't good enough and they need to wring from them more money, more attention, more clicks, more engagement. And they are willing to do whatever they can get away with in order to do this, no matter how much it pisses off their customers. I'm not dealing with it. I used to only block actual spammers. And then it got to be so many emails to opt out of, and so much junk coming in. I used to click "unsubscribe", and then they started to pretend the word unsubscribe meant "I'm a real human, spam me more!" I'm happy to give you my email address, because you demand that I do so. But the minute I hear from you at a time when I did not ask you to speak, I no longer care what you have to say, ever again. Why should I go out of my way to figure out how to opt-out when I never opted in?

It's not that I'm walking out of a store without buying anything. It's that I'm walking into a store, being followed by a salesman who is telling other stores in the area that I am out shopping, and then being upsold on everything whether I want to buy it or not, for weeks, months, or years after I walk out of the store. And when that happens, I'm going to tell my friends not to shop there. That is what "report spam" means.

It's the right thing to do, and I'm not going to apologize for it. I would say "just stop being abusive and I'll stop reporting you as spam", but no, like online advertisements, it's too late for that. I will always block your ads, and I will always report you as spam. The privilege has been abused for too long.

Account creation emails are a security feature. If someone sets up an account to pretend to be you, the account creation email will alert you that it is happening.

Account creation emails are a data quality feature. People don't always type their emails correctly, so the account creation email confirms that the provider has the correct email address. If you create an account with a typo'd email, you will not be able to log in because you won't know there was a typo--you'll enter your actual email address on the login form and get denied.

Account creation emails are a best practice that has obvious benefits. I can't understand the mindset that objects to them.