Part of Maddox's post addresses the frustration this can cause among people who create original content for a living. It seems to me that this frustration drives a lot of the worst impulses of groups like the RIAA and MPAA.

It also seems likely to me that there could be good technological solutions to the problem, that don't require lawsuits and crazy new laws. However, there is no incentive for people to develop these technological solutions. Instead the financial incentives (in this case, ad revenue) drive tech folks to build stupid sites like Ranker.com.

Acknowledged: I'm only addressing part of the story here...the friendly "you might like this!" emails are ridiculous. It's probably some 20 year old making 8 dollars an hour sending them...the 21st century equivalent of the telemarketer.

- They send through mailgun.net.

- Mailgun.net doesn't include list-unsubscribe header, which means that spam reports from Google apps/gmail won't back to the sender.

- If no unsubscribe link is included, then CAN-SPAM is not being followed either.

So if you wanted to unsubscribe from this, the only way to do it is mail the list owner directly (in this case, Nicole).

Suggestions:

- Mailgun needs to implement list-unsubscribe if they want to get back spam reports from ISPs that don't support ARF/JMRP.

- Mailgun should ensure their customers adhere to CAN-SPAM laws, which requires a working "opt-out" link.

He does make a good point. Cheap content is a big problem these days. Cheap content that can be easily copied by scrappers, that is. Maybe this will force content providers to change the medium?

It's possible that someone is automatically forwarding a different address to maddox's inbox.

It'd be worth examining the SMTP header of one of these messages and tracing back the ownership of each relay.

That's not a cop out line. For some websites, yes, it very well could be, but there is a legitimate purpose to it as well. Anybody can go on a website and enter "maddox@xmission.com" in the email input box for a subscription to SpamMePlease.com, even people who aren't Maddox. Putting that line in the email is a way of saying "you might not have done this, so here's a quick link you can use to tell us to fuck off."

You can argue that they should use a "confirm this subscription" email instead, but the two options aren't that dissimilar when you think about it.

Calling out HuffPo was awesome too.

(http://www.wired.com/magazine/tag/cracked-com/)

(http://www.cracked.com/article_16272_the-top-7-secrets-to-wr...)

about the spam: I miss the days of god-tier trolls SPEWS.

How is a tool supposed to know who has permission to do what? Yes, you can use heuristics to make guesses. But you're making guesses, you don't actually know anything.

Love that a Maddox page hit HN front page, though. It’s like a blast from the past, but new.

Edit to make this comment slightly more acceptable on HN: CSS protip: If you want to show Helvetica to OS X users but not Windows users who are lucky enough to have it installed because Windows renders Helvetica like shit, use this font stack:

  font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial,
    Helvetica, sans-serif;

http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=overrated_sandwi...

I was going to say it all comes off as gradeschool, but little kids have it much more together.

Respectfully, I think you are entirely wrong: the two options are VERY dissimilar. In one case, you send them a single "Click here to confirm" email -- and maybe a single follow-up a few days later.

In the other case, you're continually marketing to them and putting the burden on the recipient to opt-out, usually in tiny text at the bottom of the email.

The US is a bit different from the rest of the world since US law (the Yes-You-Can-Spam act) requires that US-based spammers include and respect an unsubscribe link. Neither requirement is actively enforced, so the question of whether one can expect an unsubscribe link to work remains questionable.