For several reasons:
1. If you subscribe to a list then please please please take the time to locate the very clearly marked unsubscribe link, or use the one that gmail or your other email client shows. I spend a lot of time making sure it’s suuuper easy to unsubscribe. 2. Spammers know how to get around spam protections when they want to. They can switch domains and do other shady stuff a legit company can’t, so by marking my email as spam because it’s “easier” you’re not helping the fight against spam but rather hurting a legitimate email sender.
Now, if you can’t unsubscribe (because there’s no link, it’s broken, or simply doesn’t actually unsubscribe), and this is a legit company, please please please let them know.
If after all of this you still can’t unsubscribe, hit that spam button twice!
You mean the one word link in font 6 hidden maybe somewhere at the bottom of the email if it's there at all?
I have never seen an easy clearly marked unsubscribe in my life.
When at look at my friends and parents who are not as computer savvy and often don't see things put in front of them, there is no way they would ever manage to unsubscribe from any newsletter. The spam button is a godsend.
Just a few easy to find unsub links from emails on the first page of RGE.
https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/stay-cool-during-summer-... https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/find-your-perfect-fit https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/download-the-new-sonos-a... https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/dad-approved
Not including the list-unsubscribe headers all these will have which are trivial to click in most modern email clients.
Punish those who abuse it, not everyone. That’s all I’m saying.
Companies employ a tremendous range of dark patterns to get my consent for email, then flood me with spam. Time after time I have unsubscribed from the "best products of the week"-newsletter, just to receive a "weekly product highlights"-newsletter the next day. According to the logic of the sending company, this is a completely different newsletter that I also have to unsubscribe from.
I mark all of them as spam. I'm sorry the 99% make life more challenging for you.
Teaching people to click unsubscribe links in spam emails is horrible security practice. I know you said “if you subscribed to a list” but it’s hard for me to verify that the sender of the email is the original company I subscribed to.
You mean to say you signed up for a service or subscribed to a newsletter, then see an email from the service or newsletter and don’t know if it’s really that company/person?
Did you check the “to”? Do you look at the url of the unsubscribe link? (Harder when click tracking is on, I know)
And you would rather hurt that company or person because you don’t feel like taking the time?
This makes no sense to me, and I hope I’m not in the minority here.
The good news is that if you improve your process and send less unwanted emails, they'll be less flagged as spam and you'll keep a good spam rating. The system works basically.
The system that you’re talking about is heavily weighted towards sending more stuff to spam than not.
Keeping a good spam rating is an extreme challenge for legit senders, especially when so many people click the spam button for reasons that have to do with laziness and carelessness.
Keep this in mind if you run a list and are ever tempted to mass block traffic from your site.
We don’t do any of that, but that’s also something I’ve never thought about.
Can’t you email them?
You have to accept the reality that in very few cases people want these emails, so you are asking them to expend the effort in deciphering origin, purpose and viability of unsubscribing for the few where it will work.
If you are in the legitimate email business, you should design around this reality.
I appreciate the pragmatism here!
Do you know of any articles or useful content around this?
If you're receiving unsolicited marketing emails, that is the literal definition of spam.
Random emails are... random.
> Now, if you can’t unsubscribe (because there’s no link, it’s broken, or simply doesn’t actually unsubscribe), and this is a legit company, please please please let them know.
No chance I'm taking the time to do that. 99.99% they already know that it's broken and either made it that way intentionally or intentionally refuse to fix it to boost some kind of performance metrics. Why take the time to contact them? To the spam-filter it rightly goes.
Divorce yourself from this notion that it's sometimes okay to send it. It's not just a newsletter. It don't care that you now offer free delivery. If the recipient didn't explicitly ask you for marketing communications, you're just as bad as the people offering penis enlargement pills. That's why you get treated the same.
If it is something I asked for, I will click the unsubscribe link.
So I reached out to a few of my users to figure out why they were flagging their receipt as spam... turns out they don’t differentiate between the “spam” button and the “delete” button. So really they just didn’t care to have their receipt (perfectly legit) and are clicking whatever button removes it.
The button could say “Launch Nukes” and if removes the message from their immediate view they’ll push it.
"Unsubscribe" is a smokescreen for the above purpose. Most people believe that "Unsubscribe" makes these companies go away, but in reality it just hides the fact that they still own some of your data. And if it is companies like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, they tend to follow you around the web, even if you haven't logged on to their service at the time (this has been discussed plenty).
I am in EU, so GDPR applies. I prefer to (instead) take a few mins and either respond and/or respond and include their "privacy@example.com" asking them as per GDPR to delete me from their records, which they (most) claim to have done so.
In some extreme cases, I filter to auto-delete their crap. I understand the grandfather of this post claiming that we should make the effort to do things clean and neat (which I honestly do and urge friends and family to also do), but there is an imbalance here. Some companies act in a very unethical way. They take the (beneficial to them) gamble that most people will prefer to flag as spam, than go through the multiple hoops of "Unsubscribing". The fact that he/she acts ethically, caring for the marketing effectiveness of his/her efforts makes him the minority (imho).
I don't hate advertisements or advertisers. They are people too. I just dislike the practices of the majority of marketers.
The vast majority of spam I receive is marketing emails from legitimate companies I bought something from, and who mistakenly think this means I want their marketing emails. I never deliberately subscribe to marketing emails, so if I get one then either:
1) They sent me marketing email without asking, therefore they deserve to be marked as spammers and get the associated hassle.
2) They had some pre-ticked "send me spam" tickybox on a web page designed to distract attention from it, therefore they deserve to be marked as spammers and get the associated hassle.
It is up to the sender (1) not to gaud people into subscribing to their newsletters in the first place, and (2) to send actually useful and interesting content to their subscribers.
I’m not talking about those at all. Nor the ones where you sign up for one thing and then their “sister company” starts sending you email.
I mostly agree with you, but this point only works if the company is contactable. There are some companies sending stuff from no reply addresses.
Those I just spam. At that scale companies need to be testing, if they’ve left no way to be reached.
I send with my name on it, reply to everyone who hits the reply button, and have a live chat (manned by humans) as well as a contact us form.
If someone can’t get in touch with me after all of that... That’s a different problem.
And if you're not, those users aren't marking your email as spam.
Those were fun helpdesk tickets to get.
One thing I've realized having moved away from Gmail to fastmail, is the importance of owning your spam data as I had to train Fastmail's spam system.
This is super convenient when you have ten or more "newsletters" you want to unsubscribe from simultaneously.
I still prefer to keep my stuff away from Google's grubby hands though. Fastmail's spam filter does get better the longer you train it
I've actually pinged a couple of services to let them know that spamming me is a security vulnerability, because they loose their ability to contact me.
Are you saying that a substantial number of people is routinely using your _fastmail_ address with services that send _marketing_ emails to _unverified_ email addresses?
I find this highly implausible.
Edit -
Why the downvotes? If I read the OP correctly, they have such a common address that random people mindlessly type it into various subscription nags. Can you think of a such @fastmail address?
If it's not that common, then their address was just leaked and ended up on the spammers list, so tagging as spam is a proper thing to do. However it sounds like the OP also spam-tags bulk emails they don't like even if they are subscribed to those, which is as ass thing to do. It hinders delivery to others, nicks the sender reputation, etc.
§ 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out.
Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page, in order to:
(a) Use a return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3), to submit a request not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from a sender;
Tell that to eBay. I cannot got them to leave me alone.
There is no unsubscribe link. Only “To change which emails you receive from eBay, go to Communication Preferences in My eBay.” But there is no such option in My eBay.
There is a “Communications Preferences” elsewhere, but there’s nothing in there to stop eBay spam. I have everything set to off, but they still keep coming.
Personally I'm all for requiring an automation enabled unsubscribe header and double opt in (requiring a response from a subscription confirmation email to subscribe in the first place).
Fortunately nobody's signed up for an account for anything I'd actually care to sign up for myself. It's usually some grocery store in Malaysia or something.
Even if they did need it, they wouldn't need it for more than 2-3 months.
I wanted something where I could bulk select items in my inbox and have someone else deal with it.
I just made a product I wanted :) But yeah, it's not sustainable in the sense of money -- but in my eyes, if my product becomes less necessary over time, then I did my job right
I've attacked the problem from a different angle though - I've tried to automate the service a lot more. Automatically looking for the unsubscribe button and filling out any HTML forms that appear etc. It doesn't always work but it's been fun trying to work out ways to automate the different steps etc.
If anyone is interested in a similar product with a slightly different way of doing things, different pricing and a web UI, please check out: https://www.stopthat.email/
Hopefully you don't mind the health competition ryanmjacobs.
I tried signing up on your website but I have the following error :
An uncaught exception happened while servicing this request
link to a screenshot : https://imgur.com/a/ph8RrO1
For some reason a deployment failed due to a dependency which caused some issues. Could you please try again and let me know if it now works?
Wondering if the HN Hug Of Death strikes again... can’t sign up due to an uncaught exception. Will try again later.
An automated system can't compare to an actual human, a human won't fail because the markup changed.
Or get another email address?
This doesn’t feel very sustainable.
In all seriousness, here’s what I do to combat Insidious Mailing List Spam. It’s kinda simple.
1. Get one email address for friends and family. Never ever post it online. Never use it for any shopping or anything. This is your email address. There is no mailbox anxiety because you get one email a day to this address and it’s from your dad and you love him.
2. Get another one for mailing lists. Crucially, using a rule, mark every new mail as read on receipt. There is no mailbox anxiety because the “read me” or “keep me unread until I’ve actioned” or whatever is gone. Totally gone. Need to do a thing with an email? Figure out a way outside your inbox to track that.
I started this accidentally about a year ago and it’s a revelation.
I've caught places that get hacked or sold their list and can filter them readily.
I think that this approach also helps reduce the attack surface from a hack as there is little to no reuse of credentials, but at N=1 I can't verify that. Maybe there's an oversight in my approach.
Feels great having separation on every site
Honestly with 100 sites I've maybe had to delete 1 or 2 so its very low effort
Is there a way to learn who the original list holder is and get my address off?
If you don’t want to engage them, you should mark the email as junk. This flags the email in their email provider. If their rate of junk email increases too high, they lose their ability to send email through that provider.
Let's say, you flag a mail on GMail as spam. GMail's filters will learn: both the spam filter for your inbox as well as a shared filter. If the shared filter learned that all mails from that provider are junk, then gmail may not accept any more mails from that provider.
But the provider is interested in his ability to send mails to gmail customers - because his own customers demand it. So, a good provider would just kick out that rouge customer who sends junk.
And that's where the fun begins: A big provider can deliver spam, if it's only a small percentage of his usual volume (too big to fail). And not every provider is cooperative. And the process is slow - some filter has to be fed a large amount of junk, so it finally rejects a large portion of of the valid mail.
A better way is: Get your provider to send an abuse mail to the origin. In my experience, it's still a fight against windmills, but every bit helps.
Source: I used to know a mid-sized spammer in Chicago. He saw nothing wrong with his business and was happy to answer questions.
For example with now.sh/Vercel: https://vercel.com/login?with-email=1
I'll probably create rules that sends a blacklist of emails to the trash and warns the user.
Does anyone actually enjoy those mails? How is it any better than the classic physical letterbox spam that used to be more common?
I do studies and publish them free.
I have a 0.5% spam rate, which is unacceptable according to the guardians of email.
Using Facebook/twitter/YouTube to notify people of updates is at danger of getting blocked/censored.
So, you promise to click on any link called "unsubscribe" in any email we forward to you?
Somehow this sounds dangerous. I do hope you are doing that in a proper sandbox or virtual machine.
While I can’t avoid Google completely, I don’t use their web or mobile apps. Same goes for other services, though the issue with google connecting the dots on my online interactions is probably higher than with a small service. There on the other hand security is a higher issue than with Google with many SREs on call if something happens, so at the end of the day I prefer an offline service/program to parse my emails for the inscribe button.
Is it maybe supposed to be a joke? Went past me in that case.
From my and my friends personal experience.
It's possible there's less than there would otherwise be (impossible to know), and it's a really good idea to disable either way. Same with read receipts - I'm not sure if they're used for spam, but their mere existence is just obnoxious and rude.
When I receive a spam message, I get an in-message alert, I know instantly who leaked my email address, & I can shut it down with a single click.
Originally I used simple postfix virtual addresses but I since upgraded it to a SaaS with a browser extension and iOS/android app.
Email me for details if you want to beta test.
xe2g at proxyto.me
It supports masked phone numbers and credit card numbers as well.
So far none of the services I tried supported outbound mail / replies. Replying would reveal your real email address.
My service supports outbound mail and will properly rewrite the From address, etc.
Kudos to the author.
> Note: After some input, I have decided to change billing to a credit-based system. Each unsubscribe uses 1 Credit. Over time, you should need this service less and less :)
Or what about: 5 credits free, 2 free per month, XX additional credits per month through a subscription.
Same deal with my phone. Any private or unknown number gets the mail box which I never check and SMS trashed.
I think it’s still an open question because federal regulations still require either a one-click unsubscribe or at most an unsubscribe link leading directly to a form with at most a single required input being the email address to unsubscribe, i.e. no chance to verify the clicker.
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20171003162605/https://litmus.co...
This all assumes that the newsletter unsubscription process is using the email based method instead of the link based method (which is a good assumption email-based is more common).
It's also possible that you're talking about a 'link' (a href) in the email body that goes to the newsletter provider's site and ask them a bunch of questions (why are you unsubscribing etc.). That's a different concept entirely.
From what I've seen, the email-based way is the primary unsubscription method in use today. Even when you use the gmail feature "Mark this as spam", depending on what you click, it will just send an email on your behalf to the to whatever is specified in the List-Unsubscribe: mailto: header.
However, personally I would not use it as I find it easy to unsubscribe via gmail already.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0148-prescreened-credi...
They've made it a lot easier, because now you're not required to sign-in -- which is why this product works.
I just pay my high-school sister $15/hour to manually dig through the links and check unsubscribe for each mailing list for you.
As a tech worker, throwing $5/month to saving me frustration is worth it. Sure, you're exposing your email -- but I'm also exposing my email on my personal website, and literally any company I register on.
The 'privacy' section is a bit too vague. Sure, you aren't selling my data, but what are you doing with it? What happens to the emails you receive - are they archived or stored, or do you delete them? How secure are they kept?
These messages could have lots of private data in them, even simple things like usernames might be of value to hackers.
Good behaving email marketing services are not the problem, I would gladly pay for a service that deals with those shady ones and maybe even helps to battle spambots on a global scale, by reporting spam to appropriate authorities and even using GDPR laws to stop them. Tried using spamcop once, but most reports end up "nulled" and not actually reported.
I agree that the value isn't there for the pricing, especially as a monthly subscription. $5/month is too expensive considering most people won't even pay that to read content they actually want. All major email providers have spam/unsubscribe buttons already and I don't want to risk forwarding emails to someone else to reveal even more data.
If this was more like a global unsubscribe service that removed me from all major email lists somehow, or helped with other privacy/data cleanup then it might be worth a one-time fee.
My email is my hn@gmail so I get all kinds of random receipts, confirmations, etc m. Because these companies consider them valid communications with a customer it is impossible to unsubscribe
I have seen companies generating an API key for the unsubscribe button, where the key can be used to perform other actions and lead to account takeover
Then select-all and Mark as spam!
Edit: Or go through each result, some email clients will highlight the search term "unsubscribe" after search, making the unsubscribe link easier to find.
I lol'ed. Also, I like your idea and you philosophy [0]. Good luck!
On my google mail account, I automatically forward all emails containing the word "unsubscribe" to a spam folder and mark them as read.
Also: I have two email accounts. One for signups and one for actual communication. Works fine.
Personally, I'd be really uncomfortable opening up a service like this with underage family members involved. Why not MTurk?
Also, implement as a gmail plugin if that's possible.
Services which spam users in such a fashion are malicious.
A really cool service would be to trawl your inbox and unsubscribe from everything!
Absolutely outrageous.
Oh, but it's only the price of three latés /s
