alt Hacker News> for semi-legitimate spam like real businesses and political fundraising
I don’t distinguish anymore. There is no such thing as a legitimate spammer. If you contact me without my consent, you are at best a nuisance and at worst a threat. You get marked as spam if E-mail, and blocked+trashed otherwise. I really wish SMS and iMessage had a way to mark senders as spammers.
Okay. But if your goal is to reduce the amount of spam you receive, and if one group of senders responds to opt-out signals as an indicator to send more spam while the other group responds to opt-out signals as an indicator to send less spam, then the distinction matters, regardless of how you feel about it.
> I really wish SMS and iMessage had a way to mark senders as spammers.
On my iOS phone in the US, there is a "Report Junk" button in the text message app. I'm not sure what it does, to be honest. The point of my comment was that replying with "Stop" has, for me, been a better way to reduce spam from (what I am referring to as) semi-legitimate spammers than "Report Junk" has been. That goes counter to the "never respond to spammers" advice from the comment I was replying to.
This is all just going from my personal experience over the past few months, though, and could well be a coincidence.