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In the past few days, I've had eight separate emails from Stack Overflow. I signed up for none of them, and none of them are enabled in my email settings.

  • The Overflow #17
  • Charcoal Digest - Tuesday, April 14, 2020
  • Charcoal Digest - Tuesday, April 14, 2020
  • Charcoal Digest - Tuesday, April 14, 2020
  • Charcoal Digest - Tuesday, April 14, 2020
  • Charcoal Digest - Monday, April 13, 2020
  • Charcoal Digest - Monday, April 13, 2020
  • On-Demand Webinar - Keeping Your Knowledge Safe (no prizes for guessing it's a Teams ad)

I don't know why I'm getting four digests for the same day; I signed up for none. Nor do I know why I'm getting spammy crap for Teams; I also didn't sign up for it. Nor did I sign up for The Overflow; it's more pointless crap. Explicit opt-in is required as per GDPR - all these emails have an unsubscribe link, but that's not enough.

For the love of all that's holy, stop sending me emails I didn't sign up for!

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  • What's in the Charcoal Digest anyway? There is no recent activity that I can see.
    – tripleee
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 10:25
  • How is Charcoal related to SE anyway? I thought it's a third-party project.
    – Christian Rau
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 10:26
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    @ChrissaysReinstateMonica Charcoal has a Stack Overflow for Teams instance, like several other SO / SE communities.
    – tripleee
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 10:27
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    "* Digest" is the digest for a specific team. Unless you disable it, you're automatically signed up for it.
    – Zoe - Save the data dump
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 11:09
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    @Zoe Sure, which is why I pointed out that's not okay - explicit opt-in is necessary, not just "you can unsubscribe if you don't like it".
    – ArtOfCode
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 11:18

2 Answers 2

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We had someone look into your Teams site settings (only a couple of people have access for privacy reasons) and it looks like you have the "digest" setting still on, which is why you're getting the digest emails. The opt out for this is on a second page (https://stackoverflow.com/users/email/digests/$userid).

Screen shot of the Email Settings pane on Stack Overflow, which exist by default for Teams users called "Community Digests".

If you want to turn the digests off, you can disable them there and that should turn off all emails about this Team. For duplicate identical emails, is it possible you have more than one account attached to this Team? If so, check that they also have digests turned off.

If you join another Team in the future, you’ll have to opt out of both email types at that point. If you unsubscribe to everything and you’re still getting emails, please let us know.

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  • 1
    Maybe add in the subject or the body of the email something telling it came from Teams account?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 13:25
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    It's in there. The email it comes from is labeled "Stack Overflow (Teams)" and there's the Teams logo in the email. It doesn't mention the username of the account so you'd have to go by the email address it was sent to to figure that out. Looks like this: i.sstatic.net/Eehkn.png
    – Catija Staff
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 13:29
  • If you join another Team in the future, you’ll have to opt out of both email types at that point. --> Would you consider making the default to not received those emails, and people have to opt in to get them? I, for one, find it utterly annoying when I have to opt out of emails, rather than picking those I want to receive.
    – Laf
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 17:40
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    @Laf Personally, I'd love something like that. I'm on 10 Teams, so I've probably had to deal with this more often than... just about anyone. I'm not the decider of whether we build this and for the vast majority of people, they'll never join a team at all, let alone join several with multiple accounts. We're limited in our dev time so we have to keep in mind the scope of impact along with the difficulty of implementation. :) If such a FR were requested (particularly if scoped to Teams only), it could be plopped on MSO rather than here on MSE.
    – Catija Staff
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 17:45
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    @Catija how about compliance with EU law. You can't sign people up for mailing lists without their explicit consent. They HAVE to opt-in BEFORE you are legally allowed to send emails like this. Perhaps this would be something to have the Legal department look into.
    – Luuklag
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 17:52
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    @Luuklag I'm not able to comment on legal issues. I don't believe there is one here but I'm not a lawyer. These aren't marketing emails.
    – Catija Staff
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 17:59
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    @Catija I'm aware of those rules, hence I suggested you check in with your legal department. I'm not the one that needs to be sure you are not breaking any laws, you should be ;)
    – Luuklag
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 18:53
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    So... I went through all the settings that I could find before I posted this. I triple-checked everything I could, including other accounts that would forward to me. The fact that this was still on means either (a) it got turned back on for me automatically (okay, probably unlikely) or (b) I missed it, which is super frustrating. I shouldn't have to go hunting down email settings to make sure I got them all.
    – ArtOfCode
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 19:01
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    @ArtOfCode I've been there. It's... definitely something that's confusing. I almost reported this same thing as a bug internally when I set up a new Team a month or so ago and kept getting digests... it took finding the second page to realize it. I've talked with the Teams Team, they know it's not optimal... but I don't know that we have a solution, either. Also, what I said to Laf earlier applies here.
    – Catija Staff
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 20:22
  • Is [email protected] the right place to submit a GDPR complaint? I guess that's the way to get a response from the legal department (and then to escalate to a regulator).
    – Ganesh Sittampalam
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 12:51
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We had issues unsubscribing users from some of our distributed services - that should not be the case anymore as a while ago we rehauled and centralized the unsubscribe behavior.

Unsubscribing now should prevent any further emails from being sent. If it still occurs, let us know!

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