

Your Startup Is Spam - guptaneil
http://blog.metamorphium.com/2012/10/14/your-startup-is-spam/

======
biot
To implement this correctly, put your service's email address in the "Sender:"
header (and also for the "mail from" when establishing the SMTP connection) to
remain SPF compliant while still keeping the user's email address in the
"From:" header:

<http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Webgenerated>

Note that this will show up as "(user's info) on behalf of (your app's info)"
or "(user's info) via (your app's info)" depending on the recipient's mail
client.

~~~
pilif
Unfortunately, in the most widely used Email client (Outlook), it will show up
as

"(your app's info) on behalf of (user's info)"

So at a casual glance, the mail will still look as if it's coming from your
app. Replies will go to your app's address too.

While a good idea in theory, this behavior of Outlook kind of renders the
Sender header useless.

~~~
LaGrange
No it doesn't. The information on who this is supposedly from is useful, but
hiding the actual sender is potentially harmful.

------
flatline
I love how Blackboard, despite years of legal intimidation and generally anti-
competitive practices, is slowly being picked away at by the competition, not
from some monolithic replacement but by smaller, targeted services that do one
thing really well. Tabule looks very interesting. Two of my classes this
semester are using Piazza for online discussions. What Piazza does to stop
spammy emails is let you set a digest to aggregate all messages every n hours,
which I really like.

~~~
tedmiston
My school has recently switched from a branded variant of Blackboard, to
Desire2Learn which bills itself as open, etc. From a student perspective, the
usability is not much different.

One "feature" that drives me insane is it creates zips on the server side
every time you download a file (e.g., lecture slides, PDFs) even if the
download is only one file. Effectively blocks one from using it on an iPad.

~~~
trhtrsh
iPad can't open zip files?!

~~~
dan1234
There's nothing to prevent it, but none of the built in apps handle such file
types.

There is plenty of support via third party apps.

------
justindocanto
I cringed, thinking this was going to be a rant about startups, but it was
actually a great piece of input on customer interaction. Tip of the hat to
you.

~~~
chrismorgan
I also felt that way. I think the title would be better rephrased (something
along the lines of "people think your startup is spam") or put in quotation
marks to indicate this aspect better.

------
vog
Maybe my english isn't good enough for this article, but I don't have any clue
what is meant with "RA" in this context. Neither the dictionary nor a quick
google/wikipedia search gave any sensible explaination.

What is the "RA" of a student?

Is this story supposed to be fully understood by US citizens only?

~~~
GertG
Resident Assistant <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_assistant>

------
eogas
This hasn't solved the problem though, it's just passing the buck. If the app
facilitates what people perceive as spamming, shouldn't that be something you
want to look into? If you can improve the experience for the recipients of
these e-mails, then you can be more honest about the app's association with
them, and possibly draw more customers in from a "secondary" userbase.

Yeah, maybe this is hard to solve, but startups are always claiming that
they're solving hard problems. So...solve!

I also enjoy enchiladas by the way.

~~~
guptaneil
That's absolutely a valid point. This solution is more like a band-aid than a
cure. We are still actively trying to solve the root problem.

The issue for us is that it is difficult to accurately classify something as
important or useful, and something as merely informational, since that
classification can be different for each person. As we collect more data, this
will become easier to do over time. In the meantime, we are looking at
modifying our interface to encourage more targeted content.

------
bluetidepro
This is a neat/good idea. I would love to hear if there is a counter argument
why NOT to do this, though. However, your current logic makes a lot of sense
to me. It's awesome that you (the OP of the article -- if it's not the HN op)
could think outside of the box for this great solution.

The only argument I could potentially see is that by coming through the
provider and not the "sendee" is the "real" mailbox spam filter. Maybe
"joe@bob.com" gets marked as spam in the mail client but not if it's from
"Google+", etc.

~~~
AgentConundrum
> _Maybe "joe@bob.com" gets marked as spam in the mail client but not if it's
> from "Google+", etc._

I'm assuming they're just changing the display name on the email, rather than
the 'From:' email address itself.

That is, instead of "Tabule <no-reply@tabuleapp.com>", it's now "John Smith
<no-reply@tabuleapp.com>". The email doesn't get marked as spam because it's
still claiming to be from the server that sent it, and it has the appropriate
MX records and those sorts of things.

~~~
geofft
The thing that worries me with that approach is overzealous "add to address
book" functionality. I don't want to be clicking "John Smith" in some dropdown
and have it go to some noreply address at some third party.

I personally solve this by typing in full email addresses and memorizing my
friends' email addresses, but I gather that's not how the world at large
works.

------
chewxy
Hey I was wondering how you do this technically? Do you for example give Joe
Smith a new email address (i.e. joe.smith@service.com)? Or do you change the
name-addr for a no-reply@service.com?

What about triggering scam warning?

~~~
guptaneil
We're just changing the from name for the email, and each notification has a
unique email address associated with it, so it shouldn't trigger any scam
warning.

~~~
chewxy
Cool thanks.

------
sturmeh
Your mascot is a Koala, but you don't allow students from UNSW (an Australian
university) to use your service?

> @student.unsw.edu.au not accepted

------
tedmiston
I think the product looks awesome, but I would never use it. (I am a student.)

Here's why: For me, it appears to attempt to solve the problems of: a
calendar, reminders, and school-related task management.

During the first week of each class, I "process" the syllabus by adding the
major assignment due dates (usually 3-5 over the course of a quarter), and
exam dates to my Google Calendar. This is a pretty quick process. It's so
little overhead that I think setting up a sharing system with others to try to
share the data is actually more overhead. (I have used a setup like this for
10 years myself, and I expect most students have something similar.)

I get text-message based reminders a week in advance for these special events
(a separate calendar from my usual one for easy color differentiation). The
professors always list and review contents of major exams and details of
upcoming projects already anyway.

And finally, my student / project tasks are managed separately in another
system alongside all my other projects and areas. It never made sense to me to
separate the student side when really my entire life is project-based. For
this type of system, I've used text-based GTD, Wunderlist, Taskpaper, etc.

 _That said_... If I could sign into your app the first week of my class and
have all this done automatically for me, I would be very happy.

~~~
etrinh
Hi, I'm a (fellow) cofounder at Tabule.

You make a lot of valid points. As guptaneil alluded to, the ideal case would
be if we could get teachers to post their assignments on Tabule. Teachers for
the most part already post assignments online, but the education market lacks
a good central homework management system that aggregates assignments between
classes.

What we're trying to achieve is to bridge to that ideal case with student-
submitted assignments. There's an interesting dynamic at play here, because
inputting all of one's assignments is trivially better (perhaps even worse if
we consider switching cost) than using Google Calendar. For the second person
to join the course though, the experience is already better, because all of
their assignments are already available to them. It's an interesting chicken-
and-egg problem. If my assignments aren't already in the system, then there's
no immediate value for me, but there will be for everyone that comes after me.

~~~
jacalata
No idea how your actual finance side works, but the obvious way to solve this
seems to be to offer a reward to the first student to enter assignment data
for each class. A couple of checks would be necessary, i.e, reward is only
valid after two other students confirm the data, to prevent students just
adding junk. Have you considered something like this? Market it like 'all your
assignment dates ready for you, or get a red bull on us!'

~~~
tedmiston
Guptaneil and etrinh, I appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

Regarding a reward-based or gamification system, this is an excellent idea. Of
course, it would not necessarily be monetary. To give a specific example,
Dropbox has become very good at gamifying their recruitment by posing their
challenges for expanding storage space. A similar adoption here could be
interesting. I plan to follow Tabule's development and adoption curiously.

------
Fjslfj
Is it possible to do this if you use Amazon SES? IIRC you have to validate
every address you use to send outbound mail.

~~~
zrail
You can now validate an entire domain.

[http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2012/05/15/amazon-...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2012/05/15/amazon-simple-email-service-announces-domain-verification/)

------
tehwalrus
When facebook started doing this for groups it took me a while to work out how
to filter the emails (I don't read email unless it comes from a real person -
facebook group interactions, since they are scattergun announcements, don't
count as real people..)

The answer ended up being to configure facebook's byzantine settings on a per-
group basis, which still means I get hit for 5 or 10 messages when someone
adds me to a group, and before I can get to the web interface to
'unsubscribe'.

This spammy RA would be less of a problem, as it would be easy to filter _one_
Tabule user - but it does make it a pain to have a "MailingLists/Tabule" gmail
label containing all the Facebook/Tabule/whatever messages!

~~~
guptaneil
One option is to catch any email that ends with @tabuleapp.com or
@facebook.com to label notification emails from those services.

~~~
tehwalrus
this only works if the email comes from that domain. Facebook, I think,
switched to setting the 'from' email using the users' registered emails (i.e.
the user who posted on the group wall seems to have sent you an email by doing
so...)

------
geofft
I have the same sort of reaction to Piazz(z)a, and I think they try the
solution you propose. I think it's because I perceive Piazza as encouraging
the course staff to send more emails than they otherwise would. This may or
may not be true, but I subconsciously think it is.

It _is_ true that I get more random invitations to things I only slightly care
about via social media, and those rare invitations I get by actual personal
email tend to be things I strongly care about. So the argument can be made
that Facebook and G+ _are_ spamming me, by encouraging my acquaintances to
spam me.

~~~
ghjm
The content matters too. They are certainly spamming you if the email they
send just says "<Person You Know> just sent you a message on <Service>!" and
force you to log in to read the actual message. Just put it in the email,
willya?

~~~
guptaneil
Don't worry, we put the actual message in the email. We hate those types of
notifications too :)

------
theycallmemorty
I loved the "Don't click this" on the main homepage <https://tabuleapp.com/>

~~~
driverdan
I didn't. Whenever I see someone who thinks they're clever saying something
like "don't click this" or "I know I'm going to be downvoted but..." I
immediately take the action they don't want. It's not clever. It has been done
/ said 1000 times before.

Tabule's website is terrible. It says absolutely nothing about what it is. I
bounced after 5 seconds and will promptly forget about them.

~~~
guptaneil
Actually, I would normally agree with you if this were a service targeted to
the HN crowd, who has probably seen this or other clever marketing techniques
too many times to be amused. But keep in mind that our target market is
college students, who spend less time looking at startup launch pages and are
far less likely to have seen that. For that audience, our "don't click this"
button has been very positively received, as it always seems to get a giggle
from what we've seen so far.

As for saying exactly what it is, that can and will be improved :) thanks for
the feedback!

------
nemo1618
I tried to sign up for Tabule and the activation email was filtered as spam. I
laughed a good bit.

~~~
guptaneil
That's actually something we haven't managed to figure out why that happens.
I'm no expert in email optimization, but I can't figure out why Google insists
on marking our welcome email as spam. Is it something in the wording? If
anybody here knows more about getting email past spam filters, I'd love some
advice!

~~~
jtokoph
The html to text ratio is a bit high. I would suggest sticking with a
plaintext email for now.

If you stick with html, make sure it validates. The font tag's 'face'
attribute doesn't look legal as it is.

~~~
guptaneil
Hmm thanks for the tip, I'll try switching to plaintext. I wish we hadn't
wasted so much time building an HTML template now.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
I n addition to "changing all notification emails for Tabule to be from the
person who triggered the notification" you could also give the user control of
how many emails they receive. i.e. address the actual email volume problem,
not just the perception of it.

~~~
guptaneil
The user already has control of which emails they get. The problem is that
these notifications actually are important to receive, since it would be bad
for him if he never got an important announcement from his RA. If Tabule did
not adequately notify him, his RA would have to just directly email him
instead, which would result in the same number of emails in his inbox.

------
dools
To avoid being spam filtered you should set the from name to the person
sending it, use you system address as the from email and use the sender's
personal email as a reply to.

~~~
jborden13
Do you know how precise the reply-to has to be? Example, a user in our system
is known to us as James Hendrix, but he commonly goes by Jimi Hendrix or
Hendrix, Jimi. Thanks...

~~~
trhtrsh
Doesn't matter. Only the From: and Sender: matter.

~~~
jborden13
thanks, this helped me: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2231897/potential-
issues-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2231897/potential-issues-using-
members-from-address-and-the-sender-header)

------
bengl3rt
Hi Neil! Nice to see you on here. Good to hear your product is gaining
traction

-Benglert

------
munyukim
Good story.

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mortdeus
Sooooo... Can you not do this, so I can haz more cloak spamz?

------
yishengjiang
I would have just said "haters be hating" and spammed some more.

