Posted by dbushell 14 hours ago
It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone.
It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Maybe it’s a curse of growing organization and middle management creep. The least we can do is push back as customers.
This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it.
I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a paying customer for years, because they injected gemini into gmail etc and I couldn't turn it off (only those on the most expensive enterprise plans could at the time I left).
To be clear I am someone that uses AI basically every day, but the non-consent is still frustrating and dehumanising. Users–even paying users–are "considered" in design these days as much as a cow is "considered" in the design of a dairy farm.
I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.
> We have identified a bug in our system... we take communication consent very seriously
> There was a bug, and we fucked up... we take comms consent seriously
These two actors were clearly coached into the same narrative. I also absolutely don't believe them at all: some PM made the conscious decision to bypass user preferences to increase some KPI that pleases some AI-invested stakeholder.
The short answer is a reward function. The long answer is the alignment problem.
Of course, everything in the middle is what matters. Explicitly defined reward functions are complete, but not consistent. Data defined rewards are potentially consistent but incomplete. It's not a solvable problem form machines but equally likewise for humans. Still we practice, improve and middle through dispite this and approximate improvement hopefully, over long enough timescales.
Human beings are doing this.
Isn't that because most of the other advancements/fads were not as widely applicable?
With earlier things there was usually only particular kinds of sites or products where they would be useful. You'd still get some people trying to put them in places they made no sense, but most of the places they made no sense stayed untouched.
With AI, if well done, it would be useful nearly everywhere. It might not be well done enough yet for some of the places people are putting it so ends up being annoying, but that's a problem of them being premature, not a problem of them wanting to put AI somewhere it makes no sense.
There have been previous advancements that were useful nearly everywhere, such as the internet or the microcomputer, but they started out with limited availability and took many years to become widely available so they were more like several smaller advancements/fads in series rather than one big one like AI.
I fundamentally disagree with this.
I never, now or in the future, want to use AI to generate or alter communication or expression primarily between me and other humans.
I do not want emails or articles summarised, I do not emails or documents written for me, I do not want my photos altered yassified. Not now, not ever.
Very often AI seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
I wonder if this varies by territory. In UK, none of the Gmail accounts I use has received this pollution
> I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.
The latter sounds safer. The former may add "AI" tomorrow.
Eventually they backtracked and allowed (I think?) all paid customers to disable gemini, but I had already migrated to Fastmail so :shrug:
Perhaps the fact you paid got you marked as a likely gull :)
lol. so the premium feature is the ability to turn off the AI? That's one way to monetise AI I suppose.
"Nice user experience you got there. Would be a real shame if AI got added to it."
I agree with gp that new spam emails that override customers' email marketing preferences is not an "AI" issue.
The problem is that once companies have your email address, their irresistible compulsion to spam you is so great that they will deliberately not honor their own "Communication Preferences" that supposedly lets customers opt out of all marketing emails.
Even companies that are mostly good citizens about obeying customers' email marketing preferences still end up making exceptions. Examples:
Amazon has a profile page to opt out of all email marketing and it works... except ... it doesn't work to stop the new Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Health marketing emails. Those emails do not have an "Unsubscribe" link and there is no extra setting in the customer profile to prevent them.
Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!"
Neither of those aggressive emails have anything to do with AI. Companies just like to make exceptions to their rules to spam you. The customer's email inbox is just too valuable a target for companies to ignore.
That said, I have 3 gmail.com addresses and none of them have marketing spam emails from Google about Gemini AI showing up in the Primary inbox. Maybe it's commendable that Google is showing incredible restraint so far. (Or promoting Gemini in Chrome and web apps is enough exposure for them.)
That's because they put their alerts in the gmail web interface :-/
"Try $FOO for business" "Use drive ... blah blah blah"
All of these can be dismissed, but new ones show up regularly.
I agree and that's what I meant by Google's "web apps" having promos about Gemini.
But in terms of accessing Gmail accounts via the IMAP protocol in Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail client, etc, there are no spam emails about Gemini AI. Google could easily pollute everybody's gmail inboxes with endless spam about Gemini such that all email clients with IMAP access would also see them but that doesn't seem to happen (yet). I do see 1 promo email about Youtube Premium over the last 5 years. But zero emails about Google's AI.
Or the Gmail spam filter is working.
That's "transactional" I'm sure. It makes sense that a company is legally allowed to send transactional emails, but they all abuse it to send marketing bullshit wherever they can blur the line.
A better example would be: imagine every single operating system and app you use adds spellcheck. They only let you spell check in American[1]. You will get spell check prompts from your Operating System, your browser, and the webapp you're in. You can turn none of them off.
[1] in this example, you speak the Queen's English, so spell color colour etc
We the users get a barrage of e-mails everyday because every marketing team is thinking we only get their mail, and it makes our lonely and cold mailbox merrier.
No, users are in constant "Tsunami warning!" mode and these teams are not helping.
But yes, you're absolutely right - "no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood".
(Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)
Dark pattern. They know you'd spot immediate abuse , so they delay until you are likely to have forgotten whether you opted in.
Really? I've never got a spam from them. Hell, I just searched and I'm not really seeing anything from them after the point where I signed up.
I'm not trying to unfair to marketing - they do have an important role - I have hardly seen a company give marketing real power at an org. So the idea that this is because marketing don't push back on senior management -- is because they know they don't have the power to do this.
I think maintaining ethics in large organizations is one of the main challenges of our time, now that mega corps dominate our time and attention.
This reminds me of "in order to save the environment, we are going to delete all of your recordings older than 2 years, in 2 weeks. You can't download them."
There are clear AI-specific reasons why it's being crammed down everybody's necks.
Namely: someone in management has bet the entire strategy on it. The strategy is not working and they need to juice the numbers desperately.
I always "report spam" ("!" key in GMail) before unsubscribing.
Yeah, many companies do that. I unsusbcribed from newline, they still keep spamming me. Funny thing is, they realised they had made a mistake and promised to remove unsubs. One week later, the spam started.
The correct solution is the spam button. Always
The correct solution is filing complaints with your country's relevant authority
I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.
But people subscribe to Proton because they want to move away from big tech. What’s the point of paying them if they get as bad.
Though for now I’ll assume that it’s a genuine mistake with things not properly escalated by customer support.
> I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.
The lure of big tech profits.
The tech industry has coasted on it's hypergrowth story for decades, a story laden with as many bubbles as actual industries that sprang up. All the good ideas are done now. All the products anyone actually needs exist, are enshittified, and are selling user data to anyone who will pay, including products that exist solely to remove your data from everyone who bought it and probably then sell it to some other people.
This shit is stupid at this point. All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices and sustainable models of generating revenue that in most other industries would be fantastic, and they're absolutely apoplectic about this. They are so addicted to the easy, cheap services that upended entire other industries and made them rich beyond imagining that they will literally say, out loud, with their human mouths, that it is a bad, undesirable thing to simply have a business that makes some money.
The people at the top of this industry are literally fucking deranged and should be interred at a psychiatric facility for awhile for their and everyone else's good.
Negative sum game: Growing up is easy if it doesn't kill you. The problem with being ethical when everyone else is unethical is that you'll likely go broke.
The next issue is we're seeing, is not that Silicon Valley is ever going to improve, but the bullshit is spreading to eat up every other industry in the US. Engaging in outright fraudulent behavior is A'ok in the US (I mean we even elected a president convicted on a pile of counts of fraud).
Effectively industries cannot manage themselves, we need regulations to prevent them from being bastards. Problem, we elect bastards that cannot keep from committing fraud themselves.
It doesn't get better from here.
Those foreseen. :)
(Should have gone to Specsavers.)
The business model of any publicly traded corporation, at least in 2025, is to increase the value of its circulating stock. No more and no less. The nominal business model of the company is a cover story to make line go up. The reason why the stock price matters is because of access to capital markets: if a business wants to buy another business, they are not going to dip into the cash on hand. They are going to take out a loan, and that loan is collateralized by... the value of the business. Which is determined by the stock price.
So if you can keep the line going up, you can keep buying competitors. But if you act like a normal, mature business, you can't.
Profit as a concept is a concern for capitalism. But these businesses are not interested in capitalism, they're angling to become the new lords of a growing feudal economy. That's what "going meta" really means.
Do you want to accept emails from xxx?
Yes
No
On client side...
Do you want to accept emails from "For a limited time, save up to 35% on orders from Fluppsi! Click Yes for this amazing opportunity!"
Marketing is, to some extent at least, regulated. There's so little consumer protection in the tech industry, it's a joke. We've got GDPR (in Europe) and I'm really struggling to think what else. Imagine if other forms of engineering had the same level of control.
There's this absolutely fallacious notion that in a free market, customers can just vote with their feet.
From big players with vendor lock-in and network effects, to specialists (I know of few decent competitors to Proton), the average consumer is not sufficiently protected from malpractice.
We may say, "oh, it's just a marketing email", but TFA perfectly encapsulates the relationship we have with our suppliers.
Google refused to comply and act in any way, because they "don't moderate 3rd party content". Except that EU says you _must_ comply if you're publishing a political ad. I'm bringing this forward with an appeal and then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act.
The laws are there. It's just that big tech think they can ignore them freely and even if down the road there's a fine it's going to be much less than what they gained by spreading ads.
You are actually doing this wrong...
Report to the national authority first...
Then report to Google.
Fuck them, it is not in your interest to report to them first, make them react for their bullshit. Over here in the states this is how I ended up dealing with telecom in the ISP industry. "Hello, I have put in an FTC/FCC complaint on $issue, and would like to see about getting it resolved".
It didn't matter that's not the order you're supposed to go in, at the telecom side they send it off to a team that actually gets shit solved before it becomes a regulatory problem.
But yes, I feel that there's something wrong in having a stronger case if you first do it "gently" when they wouldn't bother if it were the other way
At least on the ISP side, we started doing it this way after the telcos would yank our chains for weeks or months first, when we had issues that needed to get solved quickly. More so I started working with our competitor ISPs because it was very common we'd all the have the same issues. More than one complaint of the same type in the same area to these agencies tends to get noticed and followed up quickly. The follow through process on it starts to get expensive for the telcos too.
My next recommendation on this political ad bullshit is don't go at it alone. Find as many like minded people to dig up and complain on these ads as you can. Flood the regulators with violations that are occurring. When you think of it in reverse, these companies breaking the law will have no issues with pooling resources and going after you.
A special dishonourable mention goes to Wal-mart. I never interacted with them in any way whatsoever, as well I wouldn't since they don't exist on my continent as far as I know, yet they still send me spam. DKIM signed and all!
Left a bitter taste.
Having gone through the Proton hiring process was an eye opener for me: despite its stated mission, the company isn't special when it comes to its management, it's as bad as any other.
It is not specific to "AI" but it is very much related to it.
> If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone
... and "forget" to add its opt-out to the list.
So, when they start emailing unwanted emails, it feels like a spam problem, when really it’s insidious on multiple fronts.
I can’t wait for the enshittification phase. When the products royally fuck their fan base.
1. I use a custom domain.
Turns out that there are two competing features, not-at-all documented. If you use a catch-all, like I do, AND use specific addresses for sending, the two are incompatible to some degree. Which is bonkers.
Example: with a catchall I can create any address I want (and I do). Some store wants an email for a big discount, cool, here's a throwaway. Buying something online, here's a throwaway.
Now sometimes, I need to reply using that throwaway. Turns out in Proton, this triggers a gotcha. As soon as I add the throwaway email to my list of email addresses for sending, I enter a world with a limit of 10 max.
That's fine, I can disable them right?
Nope, it turns out if I disable them in order to add aothers, Proton blocks those addresses *even though I have a catch-all*. WHAT?? Worse, if I try to delete the addresses, Proton will also delete the associated messages in my Inbox/folders. Excuse me?
2. What really pushed me away: Search.
Whatever proton is using under the hood is easily the worst search experience I've ever had from a mail product, and I use Thunderbird on my work machine.
Notable: Proton Bridge. I get why, but it's just terrible.
So many rough edges. Just not worth it.
I agree though that the user experience isn't great because of this limitation. You kind of have to remember what the title of the email was for what you're looking for. Searching for "flight ticket" results in mixed success
It really is life changing. When you have your own domain switching email services is risk free since your addresses don't change. You can literally try out all the email services out there.
For the record I'm a happy Proton customer. They seem to be the only ones who still care about PGP. I even interacted with them here on HN a few times.
I just moved away from Fastmail after 10+ years for this reason.
any avoidable dependency on the US has become a red line
don't forget to tell fastmail that the reason you're leaving is because they host in the US!
(I also told them if they open a DC outside the reach of the US regime: I be happy to become a customer again)
I have a catch-all and can reply from any address I please. If I reply from an email sent to retailer@mydomain.com it even auto populates the "from" address for me with "retailer", or I can choose to reply from one of my named accounts. It's really slick.
Re: the custom domain catch all reply, this is a bit annoying but there js a workaround. I made a SendGrid account which allows me like 100 sends per month, and I can reply in Thunderbird via SendGrid as any email account. Annoying to boot up Thunderbird, and I haven't found a way to do this on my iPhone, but I don't need ti reply from a throwaway frequently so it's sufficient for now.
Their main business offerings are privacy and security. The fact that they were able to pull customers away from Google shows that switching costs are low.
Your reputation is your moat. If you ruin it by acting like Google, you're filling your own moat.
In India, the Indian government suspended VPN services in Jammu&Kashmir (J&K) state after a bloody terror attack (in Pehelgam Baisaran valley (a popular tourist spots) where 26 tourists were gunned down in cold blood by jihadi Pakistani terrorists who infiltrated from across the border).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Pahalgam_attack
However, Proton company has been blatantly touting its VPN services in J&K with the dangerous incitement to evade the Indian government scrutiny.
This was Proton's message: "In Jammu and Kashmir, police have been conducting random stops and house-to-house checks inspecting mobile phones to enforce a local ban on VPNs. A reminder that Proton VPN's mobile app has a "Discreet icon" setting to help disguise it."
https://tfipost.com/2026/01/profit-over-people-proton-vpn-ge...
Such dangerous messaging was even after Proton Mail was blocked in India, because it was found that terrorists and perverts were using it for terror communications and digital sexual abuse.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/courts-cann...
But Proton refused to comply with India's new cybersecuriy laws and investigations into such subversive activities. Instead, Proton removed its servers from India.
https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/now-proton...
So yeah, use Proton at your own risk.
If anything this enhances Proton's reputation. If so called "terrorists and perverts" trust it to the point they rely on it for their own security, then it's worth serious consideration. Nobody wants to use cryptography that some indian government can subvert.
Lol, nondescript "terrorists and perverts" are the laughingstock of Western politics. Eyes roll whenever someone justifies drastic action on vague terrorism/perversion accusations: https://youtu.be/ud9zBKJJQe4
My bigger concern is Modi's international reputation for exacerbating crime statistics to manufacture consent for authoritarian policy. We've seen our fair share of that here in America and it's not a positive influence on national politics. So much so that we can't trust our own email providers to be secure.
I can't help but see the spam as more circumstantial evidence of a bubble, where top-down "pump those numbers" priorities overrides regular process.
In what mind frame is it logical or necessary to put these extremely poorly functioning products in to the wild?
People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as a bag of tools glued with UI, that work together but don't interoperate much with anything else. That boundary drawn around a bunch of software utilities, is given a name and a fancy logo, and sold or used to charge people rent. That's software products. But LLMs want to flip that around - they're good at gluing things, so embedding one within a product is just a waste of model capabilities, and actually makes the product boundary more apparent and annoying.
Or in short: consider Copilot in Microsoft Word, vs. "Generate Word Document" plugin/tool for a general LLM interface (whether Gemini webapp or Claude Code or something like TypingMind). The former is just an LLM locked in a box, barely able to output some text without refusing or claiming it can't do it. The latter is a general-purpose tool that can search the web for you, scrap some sites and run data analysis on results (writing its own code for this), talk results over with you, cross-reference with other sources, and then generate you a pretty Word document with formatting and images.
This is, btw., a real example. I used a Word document generator with TypingMind and GPT-4 via API, and it was more usable over a year ago than Copilot is even now. Partly because Copilot is just broken, but mostly because the LLM can do lots of things other than writing text in Word.
Point being, AI is eroding the notion of software product as something you sell/rent, which threatens just about the entire software industry :).
See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-...
It will be funny to see the rapid about face.
Even reading the link, I don't see one gets to that conclusion.
It doesn't change the power dynamic as much as it gives new ways for monopolies and rentiers to exploit it.
In this case, the thing that's difficult to understand is "AI in everything is shit and nobody wants it."
LinkedIn is one of the worst offenders.
1. That's by design, because you spammed the shit out of it. 2. Given that all I do is send them to /dev/null, HOW DO YOU KNOW?
I had a similar situation with SMS messages that were being sent to me with links informing me of status updates. These texts were useful, and I would go over to my real computer to check the web site. Then after a few days the text messages said "It looks like these messages aren't getting through to you, so we'll stop sending them." Which is also stupid, but it works for most people that load the web site on their phone from the SMS link. God help you if you have a dumb-phone.
I've been unsubscribed from a handful of newsletters because I don't read them. I replied to one and told them I did, even reached out on Twitter, but they still deleted me.
Do tech companies understand consent?:
- [ ] Yes
- [ ] Ask me again in a few days
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4590
>We're not going to remove the reminders.
>If you don't want to provide that access, you still don't need to – you can simply tap remind me later once a month
(See also: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4373, https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/5809, ...)
It may be cryptographically superior, but does that matter at the end of the day if nobody uses it?
"It's time. Delete Facebook" isn't subtle https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...
Delete: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Meta, Threads, Manus.
Most people think of Facebook and Messenger when they see "Delete Facebook". Thats also why the rest dont have Meta or FB in their name.
A few of my neighbors have kids the same age as my kids, they're on a WhatsApp group chat, and my choice is either use WhatsApp or make my kid miss out on social events, so it's not really a choice.
"Hey let's switch to this app that nobody else is using and it sends you annoying popups every month but trust me bro it's more secure" is not a winning argument
I've made a few attempts to convert people, but no-go. People stay on Telegram and WhatsApp because they have better UX and features.
Signal refuses to see the value in good attractive UX.
EU has its GPDR and it has some teeth, but US is currently hopeless on that front, for now, from my vantage point.
I'd love to be stand corrected though.
Maybe we should reframe their "silence is agreement" message as "silence is consent".
I'm a fan of the randomly generated emails as well. That service integrates with 1Password too.
Sadly untrue since they added calendar. However I'd would say the email service and support remain excellent regardless.
Is Fastmail an US company though?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/fastmail/comments/1jbryai/european_...
Seconded, failing only when up against tricky issues like insecurity of their so-called secure Masked Email.
Other than that I’m a happy paying customer.
Over the years, the only spam I ever received there was from Proton. Quite the way to recalibrate my expectations, eh?
but i pay fastmail a whopping $15/yr to give me mailboxes on my domain, which i have always heard is a good way to track who's selling your data.
So far, nothing has made it past the spam filter, and i don't check spam (how many valid emails have you found in spam in the last 5 years?); that being said apparently no one is selling my email address anymore. or, and this is a significant possibility: when i tell them companynickname@mydomain.li they just ignore the domain and put in gmail? For instance i gave Take5 "take5@" as my email and i never received anything from them. The guy even said "No; your email address" with a weird half smile; then i explained it's my own website and email, i can use any email address i want; that it will alert me if someone sells my email address.
I doubt there's a flag on the auto oil shop's CRM or POS or whatever for "customer states they're proactive about email spam and their privacy"
Personally, running SpamAssassin, zero.
However, this seems to be getting worse with the big providers deciding to drop domains they don't like from time to time. Selfhosted email will work for 4 years and then Google or Microsoft will spam them for a month for no reason. It always starts working again because I assume that what they are doing is technically anti-trust and running it for too long would make it obvious.
Only way to stop is to start fining these companies.
Here in UK is is a frequent problem and companies rarely get fined e.g. MS never.
Maybe someone's feature gate isn't working as intended?
I did get the Github Copilot spam email today though.
