It's an edge case that someone will unsubscribe from someone else's mailing list or click it by mistake, so making every single person (99% who are unsubscribing on purpose) confirm, log in, enter their address or receive a confirmation is an infuriating waste of time.
The best way to mitigate this is a simple "You unsubscribed whatever@gmail.com", with a little undo button in case it was a mistake.
And if all this still goes wrong... if the person liked your newsletter enough, they'll figure out what happened when they stop getting it.
(Side note: I've really been hoping GMail and other clients would accept a URL in email headers that would handle unsubscribe, so they could add a button to the UI. I know that's oversimplifying everything, but it would significantly improve the email experience.)
If you are in the USA, it is also illegal. The CAN-SPAM Act[0] specifies that you can't ask the user for more than their email address[1]:
> "You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request."
See also previous thread on HN[2]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
[1] Point 6: http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...
Appears to work with Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Gmail. Not sure about Yahoo, but those two alone cover a pretty big group.
Not necessarily, unfortunately. As an example, take emails advertising pre-sale tickets to events, sent to people who have signed up specifically to have access to buy tickets before the general public.
If their friend is able to unsubscribe them, they don't get the email and miss the pre-sale access. Even if they do realise and resubscribe, there's a good chance they'll have missed the pre-sale period anyway (which only lasts a few days).
That's one of many examples that make "not to worry they'll just resubscribe" not quite work properly.
> The best way to mitigate this is a simple "You unsubscribed whatever@gmail.com", with a little undo button in case it was a mistake.
In addition to this, it's worth putting "This email was sent to whatever@gmail.com, unsubscribe by clicking here" in the email.
Eg, "I hate your political ideology. I'll unsubscribe you from the site you forwarded me an article from."
I'm sure that kind of threat is minimal and easily corrected, but the OP's suggestion of hiding it somewhat addresses that. It doesn't eliminate the threat of course, but it doesn't put it under their nose.
GMail offers to unsubscribe you if you mark something as spam and it's able to detect how to unsubscribe.
It reduces the number of buttons on the screen, which is a good thing, but I feel bad about potentially harming a companies credibility by clicking spam as a shortcut to unsubscribe if Google can't figure out how to unsubscribe.
If I'm unsubscribing from a spammy newsletter, I don't mind them sending exactly one "unsubscribe confirmation" email immediately that I can then have in my records later on in case I forget whether or not (or when) I unsubscribed.
Otherwise, it's really a very small thing to deal with. And it can be nice to have that email in your archive for future reference, like if they start spamming you again.
But the problem actually seems real, makes me glad that I am not an email marketer. If you provide a one-click unsubscribe to your users, you don't want them to give somebody else that link. Reading through this HN thread, I see two and a half other solutions mentioned:
(1a) Require users to enter their email address on unsubscribe. I hate that one because frequently it's really hard to figure out at which of my email addresses the message first arrived.
(1b) Require users to confirm the unsubscribe The better version of the unsubscribe forms from alternative (1) have the email address pre-filled, which wouldn't stop someone who knows what they are doing from unsubscribing others. But it gives those unsubscribing others unintentionally a hint about how they ended up with that message.
(2) Send an email confirmation after unsubscribe This way you can just re-subscribe if one of your friends unsubscribed you. Looks like some people in the discussion below like this approach, others hate it.
If I had to pick, I'd probably chose (2) because that's the only way of making sure an accidentally unsubscribed user notices what happened.
If you're used to HTML5 and CSS3, HTML for email will make your eyes bleed. Many CSS2 (!) attributes have quirks, few are cross-email client compatible. It's recommended that you inline your CSS, rather than using a <style> block, to ensure that it works as widely as possible. Even the <p> tag is considered a no-no as not every client renders it properly.
So while this doesn't work in Gmail, the <p> tag doesn't work in Yahoo!. #fml
Require confirmation instead of one-click unsubscribe**
Regarding the unsubscribes, have you tested tweaking the copy? An example could be: "Unsubscribe XYZ@mail.com" instead of just "Unsubscribe"?
then
it turns out that one of the people who received the forwarded email thought it was spam and clicked the unsubscribe link
It may be ugly, but the system works :)
----
If your friend or colleague has forwarded this to you
and you would like to SUBSCRIBE to our mailing list,
click here.
If you are the subscriber (THEIR@EMAIL.ADDRESS) and
would like to unsubscribe, click here.
----
It doesn't prevent malicious unsubscription, but help to prevent or reverse accidental unsubscriptions of the type in the article. It also "works" in all email clients.
----
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE OR UNSUBSCRIBE
----
If your friend or colleague has forwarded this to you
and you would like to SUBSCRIBE to our mailing list,
click here.
If you are the subscriber and would like to
unsubscribe THEIR@EMAIL.ADDRESS, click here.
----What an idiot.
People here seem to think unsubs might be malicious; they don't seem to think that people getting email don't want it and just click any unsub link they see. Don't forget that the vast majority of people are hopeless with computers.
Anyone sending email to me along with 85 other people, especially if it's something like the Litmus product, is going to annoy the fuck out of me.
But most of their hacks are not 100%
Something as simple as "This email was sent to somebody@example.org, if you are this person click here to unsubscribe somebody@example.org" then display the email address again prominently on the unsub page
[1] http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...
Go to single page->enter email->unsubscribed
I regularly see people reply to our messages and ask us to remove an address that we never sent anything to... (and we have a prominent one-click unsubscribe on every message!)
This problem is much better solved with an unsubscribe followup email containing a re-subscribe link.
EDIT I actually meant "read the article linked from the linked article" — I too spent a good minute there trying to find out their solution.
Still, thanks for the explanation. Does every mail client do this (like, due to an RFC) or just the popular ones?
Basically most e-mail clients change the dom structure in some way when you forward an email (like wrapping the original in a div). Write some CSS rules that require an unmodified structure to show the unsubscribe button.
> To unsubscribe, send an empty message to unsubscribe@...
Though it might be difficult to understand for less technically minded users, and might be a problem if you don't know what address the mail was sent to.
Perhaps a "send to a friend" link in the email would help?
Plus I don't trust you with these email addresses. I'll send the email on thankyouverymuch.