16 ms·
How does the Gmail unsubscribe button work?
- tregsthedev 6y agoReally good Read!
- seph-reed 6y agoSo what's wrong with hitting spam?
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoIt clutters up spam
- macspoofing 6y agoEspecially since in many instances, you don't actually want a dialogue with the spammer. I don't want to 'unsubscribe' myself given that I didn't 'subscribe' myself in the first place. Also, why would I let the spammer know that I read the email and my email is active?
- jagged-chisel 6y agoIn this case, you're doing the right thing: you didn't ask for it, it's spam. Presumably, you classifying it as spam helps the spam filter learn and apply that knowledge to others' inboxes, too.
- nickthegreek 6y agoThey still come to me when I hit spam, and the unsubscribe button doesn't always work either. I still find myself using the distributors unsubscribe button most of the time.
- guptaneil 6y agoFor the mailing list owner, it’s bad because then their emails are more likely to end up in the spam folder for other subscribers too.
- notyourwork 6y agoSpam is spam. The sad state of things is that people are bombarded with garbage, exponentially worse than the physical mail system used to be. The engagement and conversion rate on email is so low that the volume continually increases to convert further.
- guptaneil 6y agoWhat about a mailing list you signed up for and enjoyed at first, but lost interest after one year? Was that email always spam? Is it spam now? Not all messages that get put into the spam folder are actually spam. There’s a wide variety of emails that aren’t spam, but also aren’t necessarily wanted anymore either. Those are the ones this article is focusing on. Make it easy for your readers to unsubscribe so they don’t call you spam.
- antsar 6y ago> exponentially worse than the physical mail system used to be Really? Ignoring the "Spam" folder (which I never check), I get way less junk email than snail mail. And the snail mail is reliably 95% unsolicited garbage. To be fair, Fastmail lets you set rules to route stuff to Junk, whereas USPS actively facilitates routing garbage to your mailbox [0]. [0] https://www.usps.com/business/advertise-with-mail.htm https://www.usps.com/business/advertise-with-mail.htm
- notyourwork 6y agoYou must be older because I've found my parents get a lot of junk mail. My wife and I get very little junk mail though we also rarely provide our physical address. I get tons of email, a lot of it being spam. I've had my email address for well over a decade.
- antsar 6y agoI'm ~28. > rarely provide our physical address This. We order lots of stuff online, and I'd guess our info has been resold to 3rd parties many times. I provide a PO box whenever possible, but if something is being shipped...
- eli 6y agoGithub notifications that you signed up for but now don't want any more aren't spam. Marking them as spam messes with Github's deliverability to all GMail users and may prevent you from getting notifications in your inbox in the future if you decide to sign up again.
- joombaga 6y agoShould I be concerned with how Google treats my signal globally? Honest question. If I were Google I'd recognize that how the email is stopped before getting to a user's inbox probably won't matter to them and factor that into how the unsubscribe and mark as spam buttons work. As a user I expect my treatment of "mark as spam" on a GitHub notification to be more heavily weighted in my personal spam algorithm than the global spam algorithm.
- eli 6y agoI don't think anyone outside Google knows the exact details, but GMail clearly calculates a global reputation score for each sender that is influenced by what percentage of recipients mark its messages as spam. Then there's some additional weighting on top of that based on your personal actions. Additionally most reputable email senders have a "feedback loop" set up with Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo where clicking that Report Spam button actually passes your email address back to the sender's email system. For example if you click Report Spam on one of our email newsletters in GMail, we will flag your record in our database and not send you any more messages even if you specifically sign up for a newsletter in the future. (Please don't test this.)
- silviogutierrez 6y agoI try to be reasonable here. If it's something from a business I transacted with in the past or recognize the name, I will unsubscribe. I don't consider it spam. And I don't want to hurt their reputation. I do keep track of if I already unsubscribed from a related list. Sometimes "unsubscribe from all" is completely ignored. Which really angers me. If it's a random, clearly bought newsletter list from a related list, it depends on my mood. Likely spam. Other notorious example: business A founder also founds (unrelated) business B. They just email their entire A client base with zero association to A. Big peeve of mine. -- Edits (some more ramblings) -- My personal favorite: the "I want to receive marketing email" checkbox that rechecks if you have an unrelated issue with your transaction. Say, invalid CC details. Still, even with these boxes, I think my standard is just: "I did business with them, I will get at least 1 marketing email. I'm ok with that. I will unsubscribe and not hear from them again." Anything past that is unacceptable. To be clear: that's not how I think it should be. It's just how businesses, even small, genuine mom and pop shops, have been taught to operate. It's cultural. It reminds me a lot of tipping in the US. I'm vehemently anti-tipping "culture" because a standard 20% is the opposite of rewarding for performance. But I still tip at a baseline of 18%+. It's too ingrained. And I'm not going to protest by not tipping and try to change it. I think we've come too far unless changed by law or restaurant management. Same goes for marketing emails.
- rlpb 6y ago> If it's something from a business I transacted with in the past or recognize the name, I will unsubscribe. I don't consider it spam. I do consider it spam, unless the email is actually about a previous transaction. I don't equate doing a transaction with a business with permission for them to bother me about something unrelated.
- inetknght 6y ago> I try to be reasonable here. I try to be a little more reasonable here. If it's a business that required me to sign up to do business with them and didn't allow me to opt out of their marketing emails then I have no problem whatsoever clicking the Spam button. And, if their marketing emails go to a third party domain -- such as a bulk emailer -- then it goes into the Phishing bucket regardless of whether or not I opted out of their marketing emails.
- jivings 6y agoPersonal preference, but I feel like unsubscribing or hitting spam is you sending your sentiment back to the sender in two different ways. If you unsubscribe you're saying that you're no longer interested in the list, you see the merit but don't want to receive it any more for whatever reason. If you hit spam you're saying this email should never have come to me, or I don't want to expend the effort to stop it from coming to me. If the sender makes unsubscribing as easy as hitting spam (by making sure the Gmail unsub button works for example) then they make it more likely for their recipients to send the appropriate feedback - ie not hit the spam button.
- amelius 6y agoBecause Google trains its spam filters on user feedback. If people start unsubscribing by hitting spam, then those users who still want to receive the mailing may have to search for it in their spam boxes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gumby 6y agoWhen you ark it as spam it helps train google's spam fighting that mail like that is spam. Now if it's unsolicited stuff -- SPAM -- no problem. But if it's a list you once signed up for and now no longer want, you're telling google -- for everyone -- that mail like that is spam. Even people who signed up for it (like you did) and still want it. That's unfair to the company and unfair to all those other people too. But someone randomly blasting you with crap as is the usual case (and I includes that company you once did business with and who signed you up without your permission): that's what the spam button is for.
- mobjack 6y agoSpam doesn't remove you from the senders email list. While many senders will remove people who hit spam on their emails but not all do it. After a while, emails could be getting past the spam filter again. Unsubscribing is usually more effective at stopping unwanted emails from any semi legitimate company as they are required by law to honor it. If you want double protection, you can always do both.
- jeffbee 6y agoThe bit at the bottom about the unsubscribe button appearing or not might be based on sender reputation?
- JamesCoyne 6y agoSmall editing issue: I think the author missed adding a hyperlink in the summary at "You can check the source of an email to do this - here's a guide on how to do that. "
- jivings 6y agoFixed. Thanks!
- 0x0 6y agoIf I get spam mails on lists I never signed up for, I either hunt down the X-Abuse header and report there (if they use a reputable bulk mailing service), otherwise I just paste the entire email on members.spamcop.net
- inetknght 6y ago> if they use a reputable bulk mailing service If they use a reputable bulk mailing service instead of using their first-party domain then they are indistinguishable from a phishing attack.
- BGZq7 6y ago> If they use a reputable bulk mailing service instead of using their first-party domain then they are indistinguishable from a phishing attack. With most bulk mailing services, the message will come from the "first-party domain". They will have configured that service as a legitimate sender for the domain via SPF/DKIM DNS records.
- inetknght 6y ago> With most bulk mailing services, the message will come from the "first-party domain". They will have configured that service as a legitimate sender for the domain via SPF/DKIM DNS records. It's not just the from:marketing@firstparty.com that I'm talking about. If the unsubscribe link does not also go to firstparty.com, then it's still indistinguishable from phishing.
- judge2020 6y agoNo, a reputable bulk mailing service can still send from their customers' principal domains with spf/dkim set up to include that service's info.
- inetknght 6y ago> No, a reputable bulk mailing service can still send from their customers' principal domains with spf/dkim set up to include that service's info. Tell that to the links in the email that go to the reputable service's click aggregation service.
- tregsthedev 6y agoNice Post.
- slim 6y agoI want a button that says "ghost this mailing list" when I click it, their mail server gets a standard message like "user no longer exists at this address", or "user reached quota", whatever makes me get pruned from their database instead of having my email address validated and the "last_seen" column updated.
- mikaelmello 6y agoMaybe @dhh could use this idea on hey
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neuronflux 6y agoIt unfortunately would probably only do the opposite as this validation occurs during the SMTP transaction when the message is delivered to the server. Going back after and saying you don't exist is like answering the phone and going "nobody is home". Edit: I suppose this ghost setting could be used for future delivery attempts though. Perhaps this is what you meant originally.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoWhile true, email accounts can and are deleted or closed. Transient addresses on your own domain are usually the best (so you can nuke them when polluted, hat tip to Apple for pushing blind emails into the mainstream with "Sign in with Apple"), but sending fake bounce backs by sender while binning anything incoming from them is a close second (Gmail and Fastmail both support filtering messages directly to Trash, but no fake bounce back messages; could probably do it with an SMTP proxy, again if you use your own domain).
- slim 6y agocorrect. it's for future deliveries
- livre 6y agoWhat GP describes would work the next time they try to spam you, not for the current email you received.
- zitterbewegung 6y agoAnyone know how the macOS / iOS unsubscribe button works?
- jivings 6y agoIt's probably very much the same!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cosmodisk 6y agoAt work we have about 200K mailing list we target after some segmentation is done,so it's about a few thousand people for any give campaign. We had some settings wrong,which meant thst no reply wasn't enabled.People would rather respond to an email and ask to unsubscribe or rant about it but rarely click unsubscribe button.
- humaniania 6y agoThe tiny font link at the very bottom that's light grey on a white background?
- saghm 6y ago> People would rather respond to an email and ask to unsubscribe or rant about it but rarely click unsubscribe button It's a bit ironic to complain about getting unwanted emails from a bunch of users when they're literally just replies to unwanted emails that you sent them
- cosmodisk 6y agoI'm not complaining- it was merely an observation.
- pricci 6y agoI'm always fearful of clicking unsubscribe. It's a way of telling the spammer "hey, this email is really used by a real human, spam the hell out of me"
- hart_russell 6y agoI’ve been smashing that unsubscribe button in my email for years. I’ve never had a problem in that arena. I’m usually at inbox zero.
- RussianCow 6y agoI have a feeling that the successful delivery of the email to your inbox has already accomplished this.
- bfdm 6y agoI'm fairly sure that spammers are sending legitimate-lookingailing list type spam to do exactly this. Appear like misdirected mail to catch email addresses.
- mattbeckman 6y agoOnce you open the email, a tracking pixel will fire (usually an <img> tag), which is far more useful to the email marketer. Unsubscribe is your best bet as honoring opt-outs are protected by the CAN-SPAM act.
- hu3 6y agoGmail doesn't load images until I athorize: https://i.imgur.com/RZ93VIU.png https://i.imgur.com/RZ93VIU.png
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoThunderbird doesn't either.
- ptmcc 6y agoAny remotely legitimate mailing list will respect unsubscribe requests, lest they run afoul of the CAN-SPAM act and/or start getting blacklisted. Years ago I worked at a large email service provider for bulk mailings on behalf of large customers and we took unsubscribes very seriously. And for the really truly spam/scam emails, the unsub link is the least of your concerns since delivery and tracking pixels confirm the address is real and being used. The true spam usually doesn't even have an unsub link. In those cases mark as spam and hope that your email provider starts flagging them as spam before it ever makes it to your inbox in the future. I'm an aggressive unsubscriber and 99% of the time it works. Very little junk flows into my inbox these days.
- FirstLvR 6y agothis seems to be better designed on outlook, i would just create a rule to instant delete, filter, this mails we need Rules on gmail... filters do the labelin work but they dont actually move the mails
- Aardwolf 6y agogmail filters allow various actions, including delete, archive, mark as read, forward, etc... is that not what you meant?
- sowbug 6y agoPet peeve: unsubscribe links that take me to a page asking for my personal information (usually my email address). I'll usually close those pages and report the email as spam. If you know my email address, then put a token in the unsubscribe link so you can retrieve my address on your end, rather than making me retype it. If you don't know my email address -- maybe you are sending to a list, not to me -- then I consider you spam because you don't actually have the direct ability to remove me.
- benjaminl 6y agoYeah I find it really annoying also. But surprisingly, they don’t do that just to add friction to unsubscribe. There is a real problem that it solves. Legitimate mailing lists have problems with people forwarding emails, when the recipients of the forwarded emails click the unsubscribe button, they will unsubscribe the original recipient who didn’t want to be unsubscribed.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoSo why do they forward those emails to someone in the first place? Especially to those who don’t want them? You’re pretty much suggesting that “helping others spamming people isn’t spamming”
- zbentley 6y agoWhether or not an individual forwarding an email to another individual is technically "spamming" is moot; most spam is company-to-individual/automated-system-to-individual. As to why they forward it in the first place: how would I, an individual, know whether or not my mom will want to use the 20% coupon code for a cosmetics store I just received, but don't want to use? I'd ask her. I can ask her via an unsolicited phone call or email. Am I a spammer if I do that? Similarly, if my mom clicks the "unsubscribe" link on what I forwarded, mistakenly thinking that it was sent to her directly by $costmetics_company, that sucks for me if I ever want to use their coupons. An even more annoying situation is when someone in charge of procurement for a business forwards a "shipping confirmation" email to an employee as a means of indicating that the employee's requested purchase is on its way. If that employee makes a mistake (e.g. they have a lot of commercial email in their inbox and click the wrong one/are sleepy/whatever) and clicks "unsubscribe" on that shipping confirmation, the procurement person won't get any future confirmations for any orders for anyone. There are mitigations to this (the shipper could use transactional emails without unsubscribe links, the procurement person could do something less lazy than just forwarding the email wholesale), but in the real world those often don't happen. So autofilled unsubscribe then causes problems for random upstream people, not the forwarded recipient.
- mattbeckman 6y agoWe've had "Add List-Unsubscribe Header" on Trello for a long time, but for some reason I had it in my mind that there was a ~60 character limit. I appreciate the post because after revisiting it, I think that info was gathered from a few-years-old blog discussing a specific limit in (maybe?) Gmail, but it sounds like it can be broken down into multiple lines.
- crdrost 6y agoI don't think there are "multiple lines", just that you can have quite large HTTP headers and this one happens to contain a comma followed by a space, which the text view is using to word-wrap. See e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20180605011201/https://www.list-unsubscribe.com/technical/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180605011201/https://www.list-... for a better example.
- numakerg 6y agoMy naive suggestion. "Hard" unsubscribe button that tosses all future emails from this list in the trash and mails the sender a note that the address has unsubscribed from this list and all future emails will be ignored. Gmail has over a billion active users. Mailing lists will probably adapt to whatever crumbs Google leaves on the doorstep.
- TLightful 6y agoTL/DR: It doesn't.
- adrianmonk 6y agoI love the idea of the Gmail unsubscribe button, but unfortunately I can't bring myself to use it. The issue is that there are good-faith and bad-faith unsubscribe links. Clicking the unsubscribe button can thus either have a good outcome (less junk mail) or a bad outcome I ardently want to avoid (letting a spammer know my address is active). I'm sure Google knows this and does some verification and detection to try to prevent that bad outcome, but as an end user, I don't have much visibility into how well that works. It's a hard problem, but Google is smart, so it's possible they've solved it, but I don't really know whether they actually have. So in practice, I always read over the email in question carefully to try to judge for myself whether it's safe to click the unsubscribe link at the bottom. It's annoying, but the effort seems worth it.
- crdrost 6y agoPSA that there was a sort of "email 2.0" spec called "Internet Mail 2000" (which gives you an idea of how long ago this was, heh) by djb, that would have partly eliminated all this crap. The idea is that you can pay the cost of read receipts (which are kind of a superset of what you are concerned about) to structurally disadvantage spamming so much (by forcing it to tether itself to DNS) that it ceases to be a viable marketing model; spam that is big enough to generate revenue is also either big enough to be caught or spread out enough among new domain registrations that the cost easily swallows the revenue. The struggle is that nobody likes read receipts, so one is stuck trying to define some sort of "halfway between" system to try and invalidate the read receipts, "sometimes you have to store the message until the person wants to read it, but sometimes Gmail will download it before the person reads it, so this signal is unreliable for whether it was actually read."
- wyldfire 6y agoIsn't that similar to the idea behind hashcash [1]? I don't know -- was hashcash used anywhere? Or were the ideas there leveraged in stuff like DKIM/SPF? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- 6y ago
- gws 6y agoI follow these rules: 1) if I never signed up goes immediately to SPAM 2) if I did signed up I make the effort of going through their unsubscribe procedure 3) if I still get emails after (2) goes to SPAM
- nikeee 6y agoI follow a similar procedure, with one more step: 1) If I never signed up goes immediately to SPAM. 2) If I did signed up I make the effort of going through their unsubscribe procedure. 3.1) If I still get e-mails after (2), I file a request for my personal data under the GDPR (EU citizen here). 3.2) Once I got that, I use the GDPR to delete all of the data associated with my account / e-mail address. 4) If I still get e-mails after (3), it goes to SPAM. With step 3, I hope that I can make them notice their bad behaviour. My goal is to drive up the costs of that behaviour (so they get incentivised to change it). Also, I'm generally interested in the personal data that a service has associated with me.
- londons_explore 6y agoNearly any business that gets more than a handful of GDPR requests has fully automated it. It costs them nothing to process your request - you're wasting far more of your time crafting the request than of theirs.
- nikeee 6y agoIn the few cases that got a GDPR request, I actually talked to humans. Also, a human has to read my mail in the first place. Note that I'm also doing this because I'm interested in the data, so its much less waste of time.
- alexriddle 6y agoYou might be surprised. I worked for an organisation that got ~1000 requests a year up until recently, each request involved going into every system manually, taking screenshots, tagging files etc. Quite often a good few hours per request and on a few memorable occasions, several days work for a single request. It definitely does cost many larger companies, but to varying degrees.
- pm90 6y agoIt’s really amusing to me that the top comments on this posts seem to be HN users complaining about spam and if this button is useful or not. I had to dive into this a bit for something and work and it’s just fascinating how much effort has been spent in trying to combat spam, build a reputation based system for emails etc. And this article does an amazing job of explaining list-unsubscribe...although the RFC is pretty easy to read too!
- zaat 6y agoI don't know about Gmail, but I once accidentally hit unsubscribe on a Yandex mail account I use solely for getting mails from mailing lists and it unsubscribed me immediately, no questions asked, and without any way to undo. I tried removing the sender from the unsubscribed mailing lists, removing and adding the subscription on the mailing list side half a dozen times, but nothing worked.
- dweekly 6y agohttp://help.mail-list.com/m/59114/l/558254-rfc-2369-list-unsubscribe-headers http://help.mail-list.com/m/59114/l/558254-rfc-2369-list-uns... There's and RFC for List-Unsubscribe headers.
- factorialboy 6y agoUnsubscribe is a confirmation to spammers that your email is indeed real.
- CryptoBanker 6y agoYup, I just send straight to spam. Haven't missed an important email in 8 years yet
- koheripbal 6y agoDoesnt a lack of a bounce already confirm it's real?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- factorialboy 6y agoMaybe, but you actively unsubscribing confirms it's an active email account.
- somurzakov 6y agois there a way to unsubscribe from junk mail in my physical mailbox owned by USPS ?
- phantom784 6y agohttps://dmachoice.thedma.org/ https://dmachoice.thedma.org/ but it costs a few dollars. You can also contact the company directly and ask to be removed from their list.
- meritt 6y agoI just mark as spam. Too many unsubscribe links want me to type in my email address, ain't nobody got time for that. If it's a newsletter I actually signed up for, I respect that and will unsubscribe, but the majority is unsolicited spam where a company feels is OK because I happened to have bought a product they can now email me 8 times a day.
- throwawaysea 6y agoThe worst are emails that require a login or other input information on their unsubscribe page, or ones where the mobile unsubscribe page does not work. I report these as spam just so they are punished for the dark pattern, but I think these might also be violations of the CAN SPAM act.
- einpoklum 6y ago> If you use Gmail or frequently send mailing list emails Now that's your problem right there. _Don't_ use Gmail. You're not just giving up your own privacy, you're hurting the privacy of everyone who corresponds with you. There are plenty of non-US free email providers, and many/most of them are at the very least much better than Google in this respect. Also _use a mail client_, not your browser. Thunderbird, KMail, evolution - even (ugh) Outlook.
- jdm2212 6y agoThis comment isn't constructive or substantively related to the article it's on. But on the subject of privacy: I'd rather have my data in the hands of Google -- a company with strong compliance and the world's best non-government infosec outfit -- than in the hands of any of the other companies listed.
- einpoklum 6y ago"Strong compliance" - to what? It strongly complies with the government's expectation of access to all of your data. "best non-government infosec outfit" - but that outfit is not securing your information _from_ Google, the US government or Google's business parties; it secures it from other individuals and unaffiliated organizations.
- jdm2212 6y agoI'd rather have my data in Google's hands, where I basically know who can access it and when (US government with a warrant or NSL, Google employee with a specific business need, no foreign governments, no hackers) than in the hands of some company that for all I know exposes their production DB to the public internet with default username and password enabled. I guess there's always E2E encryption, but I'd like to be able to recover my emails if I lose my password.
- Giorgi 6y agoQuick tip: it does not.
- ndesaulniers 6y agoMultiple times the gmail unsubscribe button has removed me as moderator from mailing lists I moderate! I tend to use the checkboxes to mark groups of emails as spam, then also chosen "unsubscribe me" without checking where they came from (since I don't want to open them). When it happens to be spam sent to a mailing list, this feature unsubscribes you from the mailing list. When it's a Google group you moderate, good bye moderator status! Oops! (Filed a bug internally about this, no status updates so far.)
- RandomBacon 6y agoI don't think that's a bug. It sounds like you are asking to be unsubscribed from a mailing list, and they're honoring that request. It's on you to make sure you're doing that for the proper emails. > without checking where they came from
- boltzmannbrain 6y agoIt doesn't.
- PatrolX 6y agoMost of the time where this shows up I never subscribed in the first place. Gmail needs to handle that in a much better way to ensure they end up in spam for everyone else. I'm not hitting unsubscribe if I didn't subscribe in the first place because it sends a signal to the sender that I don't want them to get.
- boomlinde 6y agoI thought gmail "mark as spam" could have a global effect if enough people used it for the same address.
- istillwritecode 6y agohere's the deal. if I give you an email for a transaction, that doesn't mean I want your future marketing. That is spam and that is how I mark it. If you want to keep sending me marketing, then ask permission.
- ddrt 6y agoAm I the only person on the internet who doesn’t get spam emails? Or just the loneliest?
- t-writescode 6y agoI work very hard to unsubscribe to everything I know about. In general, I have very low spam volumes. Occasionally, I'll sign up for something new, and get spam and then I have to do it all over again.
- t-writescode 6y agoFriendly reminder that the CAN-SPAM Act is a thing in the United States. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
- Jaruzel 6y agoOutlook has this functionality. I don't know if it's using the unsubscribe link scrape method, or the List-Unsubscribe header method. What it does is show an Unsubscribe button above the email, which loads the unsubscribe URL into a small web panel below it.
- homakov 6y agoWhenever I click "it's spam & unsubscribe" i often keep getting more emails. Then I started clicking "block this address" from another drop-down - never got any new mail. Much recommended approach.