“...I’m in a long lifetime battle with email terrorism... it’s something that I battle every day, about three or four times a day.”
I snort laugh when I hear the term email terrorism, but continue listening.
“I purchased something for my new apartment... I know when I checked out it was like, ‘Sign up for our savings email blast.’ And I was like, uncheck. Want no part of this.”
“I’m talking I’m like eight emails deep after I purchased like some towel hooks. Something incredibly pedestrian... something you would never write a review about unless you’re a complete whack job bored to tears.”
“So I unsubscribed. And then it pops up, ‘Thank you. We’re sorry to see you go. Thank you for unsubscribing. This will take 48 hours to update.’ Which is total — and a pathological lie.”
“In those 48 hours after I declined the survey... I unsubscribe. And in the ensuing 48 hours, six emails per day, 12 additional nukes to my inbox.”
“Here’s what I hate — you put the unsubscribe when you’re checking out, but they have your email for billing. So then they keep emailing you. So you unsubscribe twice.”
“A lot of these retailers are abusive husbands. And the consumers are the battered wives... everything’s a hustle. Everything’s a shakedown. Everything’s a harassment.”
”Will you ever buy anything from that company again?”
”If I need it, I probably will... that’s the problem. I’m just being honest... the instant gratification person in me... I’ll be like, tap the vein, hit it... let’s go with the emails. I’m ready. I’m locked and loaded.”
It’s too much. I stopped the lawnmower, turned it off, and then pulled my headphones off. I was belly laughing at what I just heard. I’d been mowing the yard listening to the podcast “I’ve Had It” for the first time, where the hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan discuss all things political pop culture.
Buried in the podcast, the hosts described one of the problems that led me to build bwak email. There is real frustration when you opt out of receiving emails from a company. Most of the time, you opt out of receiving promotional or product updates, but you still receive emails asking you to “rate the product you bought” or to “tell them about your shopping experience.” And the colonization of your inbox happens as you receive these unwanted emails.
When it happens, you feel powerless and don’t know what else to do, nor do you have many good options today other than to write a rule in your inbox or mark the emails as spam.
And the scary part- not scary like The Amityville Horror kind of scary, but scary like What a coincidence, I was experiencing something similar with emails I was receiving from LinkedIn the other day.
Bwak email is one of the Tinkers I’m working on today. It is an email alias gateway that sits in front of my real email address and acts as a gate for emails I receive. The inbound emails require explicit human opt in approval before reaching my inbox. I can give anyone an alias that passes through the gate and gets delivered to my email if I’ve approved the sender.
Since I began tinkering with this idea, I’ve approved over 130 senders to different email aliases I’ve created for my k3bert.net domain. And after several weeks, I started to feel like I was experiencing déjà vu as I approved six different senders from LinkedIn.
It took the 6th approval to finally catch on to an issue I’m having with the user experience. Each time I received an email from LinkedIn, I approved it, and each time I thought to myself, I had already approved the sender on LinkedIn, not realizing each approval was for a different sender from LinkedIn. I was only keying on the domain LinkedIn, and that was the missing piece for the application.
The original design for the app included a per-sender (From) AND per-receiver (To) address approval process, which would mean if I received emails from different senders, albeit the same domain, I’d have to approve them all explicitly.
The answer: build a DOMAIN-level approval/denial mechanism.
In other words, give the user the option to Opt In to all emails from a specific domain (a.k.a. website) and forgo the explicit approval process for each sender.
And this is what I built in version v0.6.0 of bwak email. A unified 5-state approve/block model (sender/domain/alias scopes) replacing the previous asymmetric terminology I developed.
The five states?
Let newsletters-noreply@linkedin.com through
Trust everyone from linkedin.com
Block just newsletters-noreply@linkedin.com
Block everyone from linkedin.com
Block anyone emailing linkedin@k3bert.net (To)
With this approach, a block action (domain or sender) ALWAYS overrides an approve. Domain-level actions override sender-level approvals.
This approach creates a streamlined user experience, giving them the control they need over their emails.
Looking back at the discussion between Jennifer and Angie, if they had bwak email, they wouldn’t have to worry about unsubscribing; they would potentially have the option to block the “review the product emails”, but approve “order update emails” because they come from different senders. And if they ever got annoyed to the point of no return, they could go nuclear and block ALL the emails from the sender.
I just rolled this out last week, and I’m testing it. I’ve tested with sample data, but I couldn’t test all the usage/approval/denial paths due to limitations in my ability to send emails from different senders, so I’m fishing with bait, waiting to see how the system performs in the real world.
Will have to try this one out Kevin. Thanks for the continuous improvement.