Atomic Playboy

Ingvar Åkesson, chief spymaster of FRA, was on SR (Sweden’s Radio) openly declaring that citizens should consider all email sent on the internet to be “postcards,” thus making it perfectly okay for anyone who handles the postcard to read its contents.

My first question here is what he thinks of people using a new technology called “envelopes,” in the shape of asymmetrical public-key encryption. That has to be okay as well, right? (Here’s my public key.)

Sadly, Swedish politicians have already stated that anonymity and encryption are “problems” on the internet. I wonder how long until it’s illegal to use envelopes for your mail, since it prevents military intelligence agencies from spying on their citizens?

Apart from that Åkesson constructed the usual straw men about how they’re not at all going to store all email sent. Nearly everyone already knows that they won’t do this. Our problem with the military surveillance of civilian traffic is that we feel infringed the second our email gets scanned by FRA, whether they store it or not; whether it’s done manually or with automated algorithms.

This is how you make a proper unsubscribe feature for your newsletters. I click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, I get a page with this, and it’s done. No further action needed. First I thought it was a bit unsecure without a confirmation button, but then I spotted the resubscribe link in case you accidentally unsubscribed.

That’s good design by 37Signals.

Some email about making custom smileys arrives from MSN Live. I don’t even use the “official” MSN client since I refuse to use anything that shoves ads in my face in an intrusive manner.

I do use the MSN Messenger service though, so it might be prudent to just unsubscribe to their marketing spam rather than flag it spam and miss potential emails about the actual service. So I click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the mail, log in, select “I don’t want this stuff” at three different places, click submit, and… a red-colored text that says “Error 500″ appears.

I try to submit two more times. More error 500.

This is where I sigh, go back to Gmail, and click “report spam”.

Here’s some helpful hints from an email user: I can report your mail as spam with a single click. If you can’t add a one-click unsubscribe link (also, it helps if it actually works), then I can report your mail as spam with a single click. I don’t want to have to jump through hoops to do this. There’s no need for me to have to log in and navigate the site to find my account preferences.

It’s all a cost/benefit calculation. This cost me time. The benefit was that I might still want to get things like password reminders (in case I suffer from sudden brain trauma) and information about service changes.

Had this been a web shop I would most likely have clicked “report as spam” right away. I can accept having to provide a password, but after that it should opt me out instantly.

The worst offender I’ve seen here is CD-WOW. After logging in the user preferences had two places where you needed to deselect your spamming preferences — under separate tabs with nearly identical names. I only spotted one of them, and logically assumed that it would work. Then I got more marketing trash from them, got annoyed since I had already declared my preferences, and now their mails go straight to the spamcan.