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Comment by panny

7 days ago

>The only legitimate database of emails is "these people have explicitly confirmed to us that we can email them"; any other database is radioactive waste, delete it.

That's not actually how HIPAA compliance works. You're required to keep 7 years of communications, and part of those communications is who you sent it to. Amazon SES sends complaint notifications and you're not allowed more than 1 complaint per 1000 emails or they shut you down too. People who are repulsively anti-spam have ruined email as a medium.

I'm merely pointing out the technical aspect of this bill is ridiculous and everyone sending transactional emails will fight you, killing any bill you might have.

> People who are repulsively anti-spam have ruined email as a medium.

That is a ridiculous attitude. Spam has ruined email; anti-spam is the attempt to keep it usable. Anti-spam wouldn't be needed in the first place if not for spammers.

> Amazon SES sends complaint notifications and you're not allowed more than 1 complaint per 1000 emails or they shut you down too.

Good, that sounds like a reasonable step.

Now if only there were existential-level fines for sending spam, too.

Yes, I am aware of people who use the "report spam" button because they can't be bothered to hit "unsubscribe". Which wouldn't be as much of a problem if 1) they felt like they'd subscribed in the first place, rather than being tricked by a default-to-spamming "do you not not not want us to not spam you" checkbox, 2) spammers didn't act like having an "unsubscribe" link was all they need to do to make it okay to send unsolicited commercial email, and 3) unsubscribing reliably worked.

> transactional emails

Transactional emails have never been the problem. People buying lists of emails and sending email marketing spam and trying to defend that as in any way a legitimate practice have always been the problem, along with phishing, scams, etc.

  • >That is a ridiculous attitude. Spam has ruined email; anti-spam is the attempt to keep it usable. Anti-spam wouldn't be needed in the first place if not for spammers.

    Spam didn't close port 25 to residential ISP customers. Repulsive anti-spammers did that. I can't set up and run email on a rpi in my house without paying ridiculous fees to become "business" internet. And all you really get for that is port 25.

    I've run my own email server at work. I doubt you have the experience I do. I sent 50,000 emails a day to patients for over a decade. Important emails, about their health. And repulsive anti-spammers come up with solutions like "you have to solve this captcha to send this important email to your patient on Earthlink!" So after a time, we simply had to give up running our own email server and run email through SES and let Amazon worry about the Earthlinks of the world for us. 99.9% no complaints sounds really really hard, but we actually cleared that bar pretty easily. Except that one day one of our doctors dumped hundreds of our emails, which HE PAYS TO RECIEVE, into the spam folder by accident.

    I have ZERO empathy with repulsive anti-spammers. NONE. For they are the reason that email is the centralized shitshow it is today. We have AI now. AI should be able to tell us if email is spam very quickly now. Can we please have our port 25 back?