How Easy Is It To Change Your Reactions/Responses?

July 11, 2017
By Zack Poelwijk

Somehow I ended up on a spam mailing list. I started getting emails that were obviously spam but seemed harmless. I skimmed the email. At the bottom it said, “To unsubscribe respond to this email with ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject line.”

Now, if I had put more than a second’s thought into this before I did just that, I might have realized that this was a ploy to see if I had an active email address. Once he got my response, he knew he had a “live one” so to speak, and now he keeps emailing me. Daily. Multiple times a day.

I keep hitting the spam button to mark it as spam, but Google sends me an automated pop-up message every time: “You are marking this message as spam, but you communicated with this person. Are you sure it’s spam?”

I have to tell Google that yes, it’s really spam. Every time.

This isn’t an anti-spam post. We all know how annoying spam is and no one running a legitimate business would use that tactic. The point is, now I’m in this feedback loop with Google because I sent one email to an email address that now continues to contact me. I have only option a) delete the email, or option b) continue to tell Google that yes, it is spam even though I sent an email to that address.

There’s no option c, where Google might manually review the communication and see that I tried to unsubscribe and then the guy kept emailing me. Or where I might fill out a form explaining what the communication I had with this email was. Or for Google to just trust that the first 10 times I marked this message as spam, I was telling the truth and it really is spam.

So…how easy is it for you to offer an option c? Will you take the time to personally look into what is going on with your customer service issues or complaints? Will you create a way for people to actually get their problems solved instead of just going along in the same path simply because that’s the path you’re on?