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.
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.
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.
Or the Gmail spam filter is working.
lol. so the premium feature is the ability to turn off the AI? That's one way to monetise AI I suppose.
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".
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 wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.
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
Do you want to accept emails from xxx?
Yes
No
On client side...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
In this case, the thing that's difficult to understand is "AI in everything is shit and nobody wants it."
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 :).
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.
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...
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".
Is Fastmail an US company though?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/fastmail/comments/1jbryai/european_...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
It made me move to Mullvad.
Despite the fact that in terms of performance Proton is slightly better. (underscoring just *how* crucial ‘trust’ is)
The thing I pay for is Tuta. The cheapest tier is way more generous than Proton and the product is simpler.
I use them for email and that’s all I want. Every time they market some new product to me, I get closer to moving to a new provider.
I've contacted the support, but they basically don't care.
There are not multiple ways to fight back against this behavior. I am now with mailfence until they start the same circus.
I wonder what the legislation says (I'm in Germany). I know that some business related mails are deemed legal, but this seems to clearly cross the line.
You've been subscribed to some new marketing mail list against your wishes, from an existing service.
Not great, but as long as the unsubscribe button is working and this does not occur repeatedly, it just seems like not such a big deal.
To me it seems like some users demand a way to block any messages about AI because the topic sends them over the edge for political reasons. That's not a reasonable expectation.
Proton's very questionable design and claims around encrypted emails and their service offerings made me concerned, which were the main reasons I went with Fastmail.
So far it has worked well, and I hope it stays that way.
Maybe someone's feature gate isn't working as intended?
I did get the Github Copilot spam email today though.
AFAIK you are legally allowed to spam businesses, but not individuals. A handy get-out clause for marketeers.
Last week I logged into my Proton mail that I'd used last year for some government contact to get the dates, and they'd deleted the account for inactivity. Ok, I don't pay, they're entitled. But now I see this and I think maybe I'll save the $150 or whatever it is.
I guess I can't have important announcements from Proton in the future if it's polluted with these low value messages.
This AI thing is going to implode so hard.
Doesn't help that when i notify them about these things, their support people just gaslight me. "I've notified our development team about this". Then nothing happens. I told them about the speed issue with protondrive when it was new, that was years ago now. Still not fixed, no updates, nada.
I will be moving to something like fastmail, plus some other vpn service, since those are the only two products of theirs I'm actually using. It seems like I'll get a far better product in both cases for almost half the overall cost.
If they are, I see some people might be interested.
Everyone would be happier if they just focused on good products instead of excessive marketing. I'm tired of seeing their privacy slop all the time.
See, my GitHub email is not my main address, and when I got some it's either from a user of one of my repository or from a marketing team that extracted thousand of address from starred repositories to fake genuine email with my name and all.
The things is, it's always a less than stellar product. It started with NFTs, calm down for a bit and now came back with a vengeance with AI startups.
I guess it's a number game for them but I can't comprehend their lack of value, same for those peoples that subscribes to everyone just to gain a sub back (and judging by the number, a lot of people sub back without thinking about it, so it works).
Damn I despise that marketing-bussiness hellscape that the internet slowly morphed into along the years. We can't have nice things because there will always be a prominent proportion of us that would exploit it for personal gain and we would do collectively nothing against it, for the name of liberal economic or something. And forward the enshitification goes.
As someone who is in support in tech (not proton) I can tell you exactly what happened.
Day 1 they already knew which email it was, they probably had other tickets about this, they probably had an open discussion about this with marketing/product team.
Day 2-4 was the support agent arguing with marketing/product about how it's absolute bullshit to send out a AI newsletter when the user has it unticked and what they are going to do so it doesn't happen in the future.
Day 5 is marketing/product telling them that this is Working as designed and theu aren't going to stop this in the future. This is the day the support person works on this email with their team and potentially their manager.
It goes through a couple of "rewrites" for liability/protecting ass. The end result is the email you got, they know you are going to give a bad CSAT/NPS survey and it's going to kill their metrics.
They want nothing more to write and email that says, "Sorry marketing and product are fucking idiots and can't read. I fought for this to be disabled, but told me it's not going to happen, sorry" but culture and then not wanting to lose their jobs is why they didn't send this.
I really hope you didn't give them a bad survey.
For me, these kinds of emails especially stick out, because I like to keep my proton inbox clean and unsubscribe from everything I can.
____________________
In the end I got sick of them repeating this and never deleting the data, so I sent them a SAR. I don't care what data they have but if they want to play the GDPR game so do I.
I contacted MS support and after some back n forth they claimed it was a transactional email that doesn’t require consent or opt out.
Clearly promotional and not necessary but they won’t listen.
I’m in the process of filing GDPR + ePrivacy complaints, but it’s a tedious process, unlikely to do anything.
Anyway, it is sort of hilarious to report Proton as spam to Proton.
You would be surprised how many ridiculous "oh sorry some error in system" excuses you're gonna get. Right, that email accidentally slipped INSERT INTO spam slop database on its own.
And since i started to not explicitly opting in anywhere i know that when i receive a marketing email its abuse of my personal information. Under gdpr you need to explicitly consent to marketing communication. When you register to a service and receive spam you need to opt out from - that's an abuse. Some company try to argue they do so under "legitimate interest" clausule but that's bs and would not hold in court. For example, purchasing a product is not a valid legitimate interest for sending out eshop spam, they would lose.
When the incident repeats or i just get really pissed i go full karen and report them to authorities. I know two busisses had legal troubles because of me because i received deeper follow up emails while solving the case and i am happy for it.
One company that abused my personal data that i ended up not reporting was Telekom: when i contacted their support about spam incident and asked them for log of personal data and all of my consent logs and physical signatures to prove my consent, after which they said "it was a db error" (lol), and when the incident repeated i told them i am about to report them and they offered me 1 year of free internet - i said ok and never received a single spam from them ever again.
Fight back, you have the screenshots, you have the logs, ask for proof, report.
If you ever tried to setup a martech stack you konw what a PITA is to comply GDPR without any error
But it is an e-mail you send out to people who have specifically went out of their way to indicate to you they do not want you e-mailing them about Lumo?
