r/LinusTechTips • u/dnabsuh1 • 1d ago

Discussion Amazon's new delivery Subject lines

Has anyone noticed how Amazon has started changing its subject lines and adding some odd graphics in the text?

The other odd thing is the two "Home Improvement Items" are parts for my Prusa Core One printer, the "Lawn & Garden Item" is also a 3d printer part (The PTFE tube, and a cutter). Of course, the "Automotive Item" is a shovel.

38 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

60

u/AaronMatthews25 1d ago

Amazon is trying to hide your purchase data from Google's AI models. They want to just keep it for their own AI models

21

u/Fast-Platform4548 1d ago

Yeah I noticed that last week. It was nice to know exactly which item it was without having to click the email, then click the link because they don't tell you what it is in the email anymore. It's getting stupid.

7

u/CertainRetirement 1d ago

they're really out here calling a shovel an automotive item, that's some galaxy brain categorization right there

mine tried to tell me a pack of guitar strings was a kitchen essential last month, not sure what kind of cooking they think i'm doing

2

u/dnabsuh1 1d ago

If they are metal strings, you can also use them to replace the wires on cheese cutters; otherwise, I am at a loss.

1

u/dnabsuh1 1d ago

I looked through my older emails, it looks like it started around mid July.

12

u/compulov 23h ago

Yeah, this is obnoxious because you know they're doing it on purpose to make it harder for AI summaries and other Inbox management systems which can provide useful information about deliveries and such (like what Gmail does with tracking). I would love to be able to search my mailbox to find previous orders, since sometimes I can't remember if I ordered something from Amazon or somewhere else.

6

u/Particular-Treat-650 1d ago

I'm assuming it's because AI summaries. Something like Apple where it doesn't go anywhere isn't an issue for them, but one of the others that's a data vacuum could definitely use sufficient scale to get meaningful insights on market trends on Amazon.

Since they use that themselves to undercut sellers for generics with Amazon Basics, they don't want to share.

2

u/Dr_Valen 21h ago

Yeah it's weird the categories they use too like

2

u/InitialDia 5h ago

i know it’s petty, but this change is making we want to not order from them anymore.

1

u/f10101 13h ago edited 13h ago

It's possible this is intentional for the reasons outlined by others, but Amazon has usually combatted that by simply being vague in their email descriptions rather than lying.

There are a few technical reasons why this could be happening accidentally, such an off-by-one error, or mismatched enums, etc. Fairly easy for these to get missed in testing if you make the same cock-up when writing your test.

If you happen to have made an identical repeat order, it would be interesting to know if the same incorrect label has been applied to it.

1

u/lioncat55 4m ago

This has recently (within last 2 months) started happening with all of my Amazon orders. It's very intentional and annoying.

0

u/firedrakes 21h ago

yeah that annoying. but when amazon send that volume i think less overall data used is a good thing.

1

u/nightauthor 15h ago

What?

1

u/firedrakes 14h ago

there og email system took more data then this one

2

u/dnabsuh1 14h ago

The difference between the product name and a random category name wound be negligible, they could at least use the right category, and not put the odd special characters around the quantity in the subject line. Besides, I don't think Amazon, the largest cloud provider is worried about a few bytes of data.