An Apology

[FlyingDebris]

Debris here,

I was recently banned for using the "spam" button on my email, to clear up my folder so I could find my work emails.

I would like to say I am sorry, and thank you for revoking the ban.

I, running a faction, get large amounts of posts responding to and relating to the faction scene. So naturally, I'm going to eventually post on a page, and it automatically follows it.

However, using a smartphone, as I have realized, the option to disable email sending for every post, like, reply, and message I recieve, is not visible. Therefore, I get (on average) 35-40 emails from Starmade a day, making it hard to find work emails. I clicked the spam button to send the emails to a different folder to find my work emails, not knowing that it affected the website staff, or Starmade in general. I am sorry for any problems I have caused as a result of this, and I hope you will accept and understand my apology.


Sincerely, FlyingDebris.

 

[tn44]

Wait wait, sooo, what exactly is the problem with this? 0.0 Have to make sure I don't do this myself or something.

 

[FlyingDebris]

I checked the "spam" button on my email account to move the emails from starmade out of the way so I could check my work email.

 

[Reilly Reese]

and this got you banned how?

 

[FlyingDebris]

and this got you banned how?

I don't know, I guess there was something I missed in the EULA.

 

[Mattk50]

How would they know the mails are going into the spam folder? what?

Also whats up FD :p

 

[Snapems]

Pressing 'spam' does increase the chance of starmade's email getting auto thrown into spam folders for other users.
#1 It'd take a decent percentage of us doing the same to actually cause enough damage to starmade's reputation to have emails auto'trashed by gmail or other email providers.
#2 There's no way for anyone to know you pressed the spam button, but you, and your email provider.
#3 The TOS or EULA cannot charge you with not marking their email as spam.
#5 If someone banned you for this, i call foul.
#6 I like lists.
#7 If you noticed I skipped the fourth item - win cookie.

- GMail has a 'filter email like this' option, to auto mark-as-read and auto-label email. (But also you can change your forum email settings as you mentioned)

 

[Trafalgar]

1. Do your forums default to spamming up people's email inboxes?
2. Is it easier to hit the spam button in the email than to figure out how to make it stop on the website the emails are coming from?

If the answer to both questions is yes (and it is, unless you've changed the default for the emailing option) then someone should probably make some changes, because the only people who are going to go to do things the hard way are people who think "Well, I don't want to inconvenience people who ACTUALLY WANT the emails." I fell into that category, but it would have been far quicker to just hit spam and call it a day than to figure out where the "and receive email notifications of replies" option was, and (b) where to go to find the list of watched threads, and (c) how to get it to show them instead of showing nothing (It took some time to find the link since it just looked like plain text and I was only looking for buttons and links), and (d) how to select them all and make them stop sending emails.

Banning people for being fed up with you spamming their inbox doesn't strike me as a very good way to build a friendly community.

 

[Pholopalus]

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying your banned from. You're not banned from the forums, nor do you have any warning points.

 

[FlyingDebris]

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying your banned from. You're not banned from the forums, nor do you have any warning points.

I was emailed by resba earlier today, and apparently I was banned for "abusing the spam report tool" in my email client. I was only banned for an hour or so and could not access the forums using my SM account before my appeal was accepted.

"

Hello,

It has come to our attention that you have been using the spam reporting tool of your email client to unfairly mark emails you requested as spam.

Because of this, we are forced to close your account and refuse service to you in the future. You are here by notified that you do not have any further permission to make use of any StarMade Dock services.

If you wish to appeal this decision, please reply directly to this email within 72 hours. After this time, the decision will be made final.

Best regards,
Matt Sowden "resba"
Gamer Dock/StarMade Dock
Chief of Operations and Services

"

 

[CyberTao]

I dont understand this at all :u Pretty sure I marked it as spam in my email account awhile ago (because the sheer number of emails I got, and actually not asking for any of them) and never got noticed this, Nor do I remember reading about it in the EULA/ToC

 

[Mattk50]

Looks like a phishing mail. Are you sure it linked to the real forums?

 

[Trafalgar]

I was emailed by resba earlier today, and apparently I was banned for "abusing the spam report tool" in my email client. I was only banned for an hour or so and could not access the forums using my SM account before my appeal was accepted.

"Hello,

It has come to our attention that you have been using the spam reporting tool of your email client to unfairly mark emails you requested as spam.

Because of this, we are forced to close your account and refuse service to you in the future. You are here by notified that you do not have any further permission to make use of any StarMade Dock services.

If you wish to appeal this decision, please reply directly to this email within 72 hours. After this time, the decision will be made final.

Best regards,
Matt Sowden "resba"
Gamer Dock/StarMade Dock
Chief of Operations and Services

"

How could he have possibly known that you were using the spam report tool in your email client*? (And even if he had known, he'd have been wrong because you never asked for those emails - they were turned on by default and could only be turned off by a convoluted series of steps!)

Did you follow a link in the email which you then tried (and failed (or succeeded and got a 'banned' message)) to log in to, or did you go to star-made.org and follow the links to reach the forum yourself to make sure you weren't being entrapped by a phishing attempt?

* I am, of course, under the assumption that your email provider and email providers in general aren't so terrible as to inform spammers whenever someone marks their emails as spam just in case they want to retaliate in some way.

 

[Commodore]

* I am, of course, under the assumption that your email provider and email providers in general aren't so terrible as to inform spammers whenever someone marks their emails as spam just in case they want to retaliate in some way.

If anything that flying has said in this thread is accurate, the sender does see when emails are marked as spam. That would be a pretty serious breach if user's trust IMO. What email service are you using?

 

[FlyingDebris]

I logged on to the forums, and it gave me a banned message. I checked my email, and the email I had quoted was there. I made an appeal, and the ban was lifted a few hours later. I've got this account linked to Yahoo mail.

 

[rece ktore leczo]

At the bottom of every e-mail from Starmadedock there is a link to disable auto-mail-notifications. This is very often used system in auto-notifications.
I previously tried to disable e-mails by site settings but i think it didn't work, i'm not sure because i haven't read any of e-mails i got and haven't compared the time of receiving them with responses on the forum.

About ban - it's quite an overreaction but i can understand that if many people would mark these e-mails as spam, nobody would receive them anymore because of automatic filtering.

 

[therimmer96]

I feel a ban was abit over the top. What you report as spam or filter in your email client is your business, and starmade dock surely can not ban you for this. How did they even find out you did this? sounds odd to me :/

 

[wedtm]

Hey everyone, I can offer some insight into this since I was the one who was initially notified about the issue.

Most email clients these days use what's called a Spam FBL (FeedBack Loop). If an email that we send is marked as "Spam" in your client, a report of this is sent back to the original sender. This is designed to help alert owners of mail servers to keep their sending habits in check.

Delivering email reliably is a pretty hard thing to do in today's world. There are numerous security settings one has to do (for the curious you can look up things like SPF, DKIM, DomainKeys) in order to ensure that the emails that are sent don't end up in the spam folder, or even rejected completely.

Because of all these, as well as the potential for malicious use of an improperly secured mail server, we actually out-source this to Amazon and their Simple Email Service.

Now, let's get back to the Spam FBL. When that email saying "Hey, you just sent us spam" reaches Amazon, they add it to a list within their system that then denies us from sending to them in the future. After all, you just told them you thought it was SPAM, why would they want you to continue getting spam emails? While we can remove emails from this list, it's a lengthly process, and one that is completely avoidable if one simply uses their email client correctly.

To speak to this specific issue, it appears that FlyingDebris was simply trying to clear out their email, and didn't intend for the nearly 50 Spam complaints that they generated by marking them as spam instead of simply deleting them.

Mistakes happen, we understand that. However, as a good rule to follow in the future, don't mark emails as spam unless they really are. Not only are you going to prevent us from reaching you in the future; but you are training the Spam filter of your email provider to treat emails LIKE that as spam in the future, as well.

It's important to think about what you're actually trying to accomplish when you click the Spam button. If you ever want to receive email from that sender again, it's best to just delete it. If there are more emails than you'd like, take the time to adjust the settings for your account.

 

[Mattk50]

I wasn't aware of the spam feedback loop system. Upon doing some research, this is a service provided by most webmail clients only to trusted marketing partners, i guess amazon falls within that category. Based on my brief asking around, this system isn't known by the overwhelimg majority of email users, even more advanced users. Permabanning (unless they catch the email they specifically junked within an arbitrary time limit) people because they used their email client correctly within their knowledge (you junk things from senders you want to stop seeing) is not reasonable.

Furthermore, according to FD the settings to disable the sending of these emails from your website is unavailable on mobile devices, which is well within reasonable grounds to call this actual spam mail. If the sending cannot be disabled within reasonable means, then you are in fact sending out unwanted emails. And worse, it looks like you've seen fit to blackmail people to get these spam strikes off your mail server.

Mistakes do happen. If it is your choice to use a service that forces you to cater to amazon's arbitrary regulations, you shouldn't complain about it and foist it on your customers. In fact, i think its pretty much a given that Flying Debris deserves an apology of his own at this point, for having to deal with your stupid shit and that ban.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Now hang on, Matt, I'm not telling them to apologize to me for something I started. It was my mistake for not knowing about what the spam button did other than move emails I didn't need to see into a different folder. I think wedtm gave an accurate description of what happened.