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Show HN: Please-unsubscribe.com – fwd emails to unsubscribe from marketing
- ZoomStop 6y agoI find it fitting that #1 on your Wall of Shame is Uber. I've lost count of how many times I've tried to unsubscribe from their marketing. Even marking it as spam in Gmail dosen't seem to help.
- jen729w 6y agoCool idea I suppose, but for $5/month wouldn’t I just not sign up to those mailing lists in the first place? Or get another email address? This doesn’t feel very sustainable.
- camhart 6y agoOr just click the unsubscribe button myself? Is forwarding the email really any easier than unsubscribing yourself?
- jen729w 6y agoA fine option, which I also endorse. 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.
- remote_phone 6y agoThis kind of works. But also realize that if your email makes it into their contacts, then phone apps will harvest this. Things like WhatsApp or LinkedIn will definitely harvest these so it’s not nearly as secure as you believe. You could have double indirection where you create a secret email and give everyone a second secret email and forward all emails from there.
- fabienpenso 6y agoJust filter all those mail into a unsubscribe folder instead of marking them as read. Also filter all emails with unsubscribe in their body to that folder. Works like a charm.
- gus_massa 6y ago> Get one email address for friends and family. Never ever post it online. It works until someone sends an email with cat photos to your secret address and all their contact list, and forget to use bcc.
- Moru 6y agoThat's why you have one mail for clueless and one for those that do have a clue. Been doing thish for 25? years :-)
- gruturo 6y agoI have been doing this for well over 10 years and can confirm the approach, with one small tweaks: The address for friends and family should be split in 2 - one for the really technologically literate ones, who will never do stupid crap with it like using it in a pinterest "Share this!" form, and one for everyone else (who must never learn you didn't give them "best" address because they're clueless). Also, if you own a few domains, devote a whole cheap one to mailing lists, online subscription and whatever else. Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service (like mybank@myjunkmaildomain.icu, amazon@myjunkmaildomain.icu, facebook@myjunkmaildomain.icu, somedodgyonlinemerchant@myjunkmaildomain.icu etc). This gives you the benefit of seeing who leaked your address when you see spam, of being able to disable them individually, of being able to migrate provider with no impact to your accounts (just repoint your own domain's email forwardings)
- Moru 6y agoYou can also use the + for email adress, my.name+facebook@domain.com. No need to register another mail adress for each service. It can lead to problems logging in though, not everyone knows that + is a legal character in mail adresses.
- pta2002 6y agoCan also just get a catchall and forward everything to the same inbox, and then create folders based on the receiving email.
- paledot 6y agoI had enough validation and dictation issues with that approach that I registered a catchall email on a subdomain, so I give out yoursitename@email.example.com. For one thing, anyone wise to that trick will just strip /\+[^@]*/ from your address and bypass the fingerprinting.
- D-Coder 6y agoPanix.com has a feature that sidesteps that problem. It accepts any email address that looks like: hackernews@myname.users.panix.com, where you can customize "hackernews" to be a mailing list, company, or any text; and "myname" is your actual email address, eg myname@panix.com. No charge. Works great. Easily filtered. Disclaimer: just a satisfied customer.
- faitswulff 6y agoI just set up a wildcard email forwarder on my domain and set up an email address for every domain or website I sign up for (e.g. ycombinator.com@mydomain.net). Keeps everything nicely separated, logins are predictable, and I can track who got my email from where. It makes certain things more complicated, like authenticating against certain services, or if someone sends and invitation to one of your domain emails, but it works just fine 95% of the time.
- mtlynch 6y agoI used to have this problem with Gmail because it was easy to receive mail at a new address, but always a 10-minute process to start sending mail from a new address. I just switched to Fastmail and was pleasantly surprised with their solution. You can set up wildcard response aliases so that if you receive an email to random.onetime@mydomain.net, when you hit reply, it automatically sends from the random.onetime@mydomain.net.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoI’ve been dealing with that frustrating aspect of Gmail for years, had no idea fastmail had a better solution. Thanks for the heads up!
- faitswulff 6y agoOh wow, that’s actually a very compelling reason to look at FastMail, thanks!
- toast0 6y agoMailbox anxiety goes away after you have a couple thousand unread emails for years. Mark as read is too much work. Whatever.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cabaalis 6y agoI have never once in my life "signed up" to a mailing list. The only reason I can think of that I receive so much spam is from sites where I've used my email address selling that information to others, or otherwise leaking it.
- rainbowzootsuit 6y agoI have my own domain with [anything]@mydomain.tld gets forward to my real address, so I generally use a unique email address for any service, retailer, mailing list etc. A password manager is a real benefit for this. 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.
- markdown 6y agoThis should really be a $1.99/yr service.
- kevsim 6y agoI love how minimalist the site is. On the other hand, you should probably at the very least have a terms & conditions and a privacy policy there.
- marban 6y agoClicking unsubscribe myself vs. forwarding an email and potentially exposing private data —> Is that the argument?
- MattGaiser 6y agoOne thing I would be worried about is that a lot of emails have auto login urls if you click a button. For example, if you get an email from Quora, you are auto logged into Quora from that link.
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoThat's a fair point. I didn't realize they embedded login links, unless you explicitly do something. For example with now.sh/Vercel: https://vercel.com/login?with-email=1 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.
- sdfhbdf 6y agoDepends on the implementation, at $WORK we have similar mechanism but the links clicked in the email do what's called a partial login that gives basic access to some closed pages but still needs authentication to access or change account details. We have this exactly because people forward emails and such.
- MattGaiser 6y agoWhat kind of person needs 60 unsubscribes per month? That seems like an insane number of newsletters/marketing lists to be subscribed to. Even if they did need it, they wouldn't need it for more than 2-3 months.
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoI get a lot of junk mail haha. It's like any time I purchase something from Walmart or Newegg, they subscribe me to like 5 mailing lists. 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
- MattGaiser 6y agoMake it so that you can gift subscriptions. This is the kind of thing to give to a CEO friend as a gift. If they are actually chief of something, then it saves them time which is precious to them. If it is your friend and his one person marketing firm, makes a fun gift.
- abraae 6y agoThat's genius pricing. Would it work? Like gym memberships, mostly they would probably just be unused, improving profitability.
- MattGaiser 6y ago1 year for $10-$20. Something I can give to the people who claim to "always be busy."
- rkagerer 6y agoI've used the same email address since the 90's and could surely surpass that if I turned off my spam filter.
- redis_mlc 6y agoEmails in the US have an unsubscribe link, and failing that web email clients have "report spam" links. Don't understand the need for this service.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe unsubscribe link often has dark patterns to try and defeat your attempt so I can see some getting frustrated and giving up. So maybe for the less technically inclined?
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoYeah, that's the main problem. 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.
- redis_mlc 6y agoBut usually it doesn't. You know, because that's US law.
- jonwinstanley 6y agoI think the way you've set it up is really great, allowing the user to try out/start using the product and just let them when they owe money seems very simple. However, personally I would not use it as I find it easy to unsubscribe via gmail already.
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoYeah, Gmail is nice because it shows a little gray unsubscribe link that they pluck out. I use Thunderbird with Protonmail and it doesn't have that... and I really don't want to go back to Gmail :/
- Ayesh 6y agoGmail works with the List-Unsubscribe email header. I don't think it will be too much work to create a Thunderbird addon with similar functionality.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arkitaip 6y agoI've gotten into the habit of spam labeling these emails, hoping they contribute to the great spam filter in the sky. This works much better than unsubscribing because most of these emails aren't even intended for me but the jerks who keep using my email address to sign up for services and aren't required to verify the email address they provided. 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.
- homero 6y agoThat gets you blacklisted on email service providers so you risk missing order confirmations etc.
- kristaps 6y agoPretty sure sending only legitimely useful emails to customers will not get any vendor blacklisted.
- jopsen 6y agoYou mean it gets the spammer blacklisted so they risk being unable to contact me. 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.
- 6y ago
- m4lvin 6y ago"We will manually unsubscribe you" 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.
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoYeah it's done on a virtual machine that logs screenshots once a second for auditing purposes.
- carok 6y agoScreenshots including potential personal data contained in forwarded emails? How long amd where are these screenshots stored and what happens to them afterwards?
- rkagerer 6y agoHow about those fake "unsubscribe" links that actually record your email address in a database as a valid hit?
- randomsearch 6y agoJust a thought: what about focusing on the really annoying emails? So that when someone who is not very techie can't figure out why they keep getting the damn emails, they forward them to you? Rather than as a general purpose service. Also, implement as a gmail plugin if that's possible.
- Kiro 6y agoWhat YC batch? Or is this a Show HN rather than a Launch HN?
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoWhoops. I didn't realize that "Launch HN" indicated it originated from YC. I'd change it, but I don't think I can.
- Kiro 6y agoI don't think it breaks any rules but one benefit of prefixing it with Show HN is that it shows up on https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show (Launch HN does as well but only the "official" ones). Not that it matters considering your post is almost #1 on the front page even without that extra exposure.
- tatwootw 6y agoWhen I receive unwanted email from the same sender more than once I just mark it as spam. No need for unsubscribe.
- vzaliva 6y agoI do not want to sound negative but my honest opinion is that you need to work on your price model. Very few people will be ready to pay $5-10 per month(!) for such small convenience. Assuming that you do mostly automatic processing your actual costs should be really small (per user). You can probably offer this service for $5/year and still make profit, while attracting more users.
- manigandham 6y agoThe site says emails are manually processed and a comment here by the poster [1] states that they pay $15/hr for someone to do it. 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. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013979
- alientida 6y agoReminds me of the new Spam offering from DoNotPay.com
- metalliqaz 6y agoThis is awfully expensive for a service that Gmail includes for free.
- jaimex2 6y agoAll my emails that come from domains I have not whitelisted get thrown in the trash. Works pretty well. Same deal with my phone. Any private or unknown number gets the mail box which I never check and SMS trashed.
- butz 6y agoWhat about shady services that won't unsubscribe your email even if you do it from their admin panel or just outright doesn't work? What about services that provide a really complicated unsubscribtion procedure, e.g. enter password, fill multi-page quiz why you are leaving, wait up to 24h for some code that you will have no idea where to enter. And finally, I suspect there are just plain evil "services" that after unsubscribing will put up your email on various spam lists - have fun with even more spam. 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.
- sethgecko 6y agoI have an email rule that sends any email that contains the word unsubscribe to the spam folder.
- harha 6y agoApple Mail parses the unscribe link and offers an unscribe button on the top of the message. That's easier than a forward and not yet another service.
- jerrygoyal 6y agogmail also provides such unsubscribe button
- iamacyborg 6y agoIt's a default list-unsubscribe header which pretty much every marketing sender will include in their emails. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8058 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8058
- harha 6y agoCool, it seems to work most of the time, i guess where it doesn’t the spam folder is the place to go.
- iamacyborg 6y agoOr just hit the unsub link in the email.
- harha 6y agoThat’s not always so easy to find, it’s often in a small font in a hardly visible color at the bottom of the email. Having a button that’s always on the same position is more useful.
- harha 6y agoSo I’ve heard. I’ve become more sensitive lately about providing external services my data. 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.
- joosters 6y agoNice idea! 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.
- ryanmjacobs 6y agoThat's a fair point. I added an update to the Privacy section. I really don't care about these spam emails, plus Gsuite only offers 30 GB for the plan I purchased. After processing, the emails will be sent to Gmail's trash, which is cleared every 30 days.
- monkin 6y agoIsn’t that feature in many email clients/providers? I know that ProtonMail has one, probably Hey too.
- tyingq 6y agoYour pricing model does seem to need some work. Credits would likely be a better match than a monthly service. It would better fit the nature of the problem. But, kudos on offering a manual service in a space where automation can easily fail.
- sdfhbdf 6y agoWow. Your comment is 2 hours old and it seems the model is already changed. 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 :)
- Garlef 6y agoI'm not sure. Growth in users might be slower but growth in revenue might be better with a subscription model. Maybe have both? Or what about: 5 credits free, 2 free per month, XX additional credits per month through a subscription.
- theelous3 6y agoHaha! That's so expensive. 10 quid a month for the sometimes minor convenience of not hitting the block button when an email has no unsubscribe at the bottom. Is this really the same value as comparably priced subscription services? How did they come up with this pricing model? Absolutely outrageous. Oh, but it's only the price of three latés /s
- kenniskrag 6y agoSome years ago there was a bug in anti virus software, where they used the unsubscribe link for scanning and also triggered the unsubscribe.
- sizt 6y agoand all this time i thought hacker news had no sense of humor ...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arielm 6y agoAs someone who’s responsible for sending emails, all of the comments about “marking it as spam is easier than unsubscribing” really make me cringe. 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!
- user5994461 6y ago>>> please please please take the time to locate the very clearly marked unsubscribe link 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.
- iamacyborg 6y ago> I have never seen an easy clearly marked unsubscribe in my life. Just a few easy to find unsub links from emails on the first page of RGE. https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/stay-cool-during-summer-workouts https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/stay-cool-during-summer-... https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/find-your-perfect-fit https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/find-your-perfect-fit https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/download-the-new-sonos-app https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/download-the-new-sonos-a... https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/dad-approved 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.
- hankchinaski 6y agoi love the low touch design however this is too expensive
- nullandvoid 6y agoFor me fast mail alias for every site I use, and a password manager, mean spam is a problem of the past Feels great having separation on every site
- sleavey 6y agoHow does this reduce spam? All it tells you is which site sold or leaked your information to the spammer.
- m0nty 6y agoYou can remove the alias later, email to that address will bounce. I do the same with my own domain on postfix/dovecot.
- nullandvoid 6y agoJust delete the alias once you see any rubbish hit your inbox Honestly with 100 sites I've maybe had to delete 1 or 2 so its very low effort
- geekrax 6y agoI do the same with my custom domain with a catch all email-address that end up in one gmail inbox where I have setup specific filters and rules. Everything I don't care about (ex: linkedin@mydomain) goes straight to trash. A few things get marked as read and archived automatically (ex: pge@mydomain)
- the_french 6y agoI honestly have never wanted to receive mail from anyone other than a real human being. There is not a single 'account update' or marketing mail, etc.. that I am happy to see, nor has there ever been. Does anyone actually enjoy those mails? How is it any better than the classic physical letterbox spam that used to be more common?
- marketingPro 6y agoNewsletters? 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.
- tgb 6y agoYou don't want a transfer confirmation from your bank? Or a ticket number from your airline? Or an alert that your tax documents are available?
- m-p-3 6y agoI send them to my Inoreader account, I don't need those mixed with my important emails.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoMy e-mail address is on a 3rd party list that is sold repeatedly to marketers. The marketers do not employ unsubscribe links or provide a means to get off of their list in the e-mail. I'd rather not engage them and ask their source. Is there a way to learn who the original list holder is and get my address off?
- dharmab 6y agoThis is illegal in the US under the CAN-SPAM act, with severe penalties. No legitimate company will send marketing emails without an opt-out. 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.
- J-Kuhn 6y agoAfaik, there is no automated information flow to the provider. It kind of works, but differently than you said. 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.
- reaperducer 6y agoGMail's filters will learn: both the spam filter for your inbox as well as a shared filter Considering how many dozens of times I’ve marked messages from Soma as spam in Gmail, yet they still keep coming, I have zero faith in Gmail’s learning ability. Either that or Soma can pay Google to bypass the spam filter. Other email providers will.
- pyepye 6y agoI created a similar service earlier this year which runs on exactly the same idea (forwarding emails to unsubscribe to them). It's nice to see some validation for the idea on HN. 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/ https://www.stopthat.email/ Hopefully you don't mind the health competition ryanmjacobs.
- tobyhinloopen 6y agoYours is much better/cheaper
- Zetaphor 6y agoCheaper sure, but definitely not better. An automated system can't compare to an actual human, a human won't fail because the markup changed.
- bonestamp2 6y agoIt's not necessarily worse either -- if they're actively monitoring failures, updating their process and re-running the failed unsubscribes. It should be much easier to scale... especially if they move beyond using html forms and just hit the endpoints that the forms are hitting.
- niea_11 6y agoHi @pyepye, 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 https://imgur.com/a/ph8RrO1
- pyepye 6y ago
- Garlef 6y agoMy solutions: 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.
- throwawayiionqz 6y agoSearch for emails with the word "unsubscribe". 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.
- robertelder 6y agoHow does this work from a technical perspective? If I forward mail to this service instead of clicking the 'unsubscribe' link, then how do they 'unsubscribe' me on my behalf? In order to complete the unsubscription process, the newsletter owner needs to receive an email (usually generated automatically by the mail client when clicking the 'unsubscribe link') that comes from the person being unsubscribed. If I outsource this process, this means that 'please-unsubscribe.com' will need to spoof emails from me on my behalf and send them the email specified in the List-Unsubscribe email header. If spoofed emails are not used and they come from 'please-unsubscribe.com' this won't be very actionable to the newsletter owner. From their perspective, they're now going to get 'unsubscribe' notifications that all come from an email at 'please-unsubscribe.com' which never signed up to the newsletter in the first place. 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).
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoIt's not at all common anymore to use email replies for unsubscribing. All the marketing emails I get have unsubscribe links, and it's been that way for a few years at least.
- robertelder 6y agoI just checked a few newsletter emails in my inbox, and they all offer List-Unsubscribe: mailto: based unsubscription. From what I see, it is quite universal and more common than link-based unsubscription. Newsletter providers prefer not to use the url based unsubscription because some email providers will crawl the URLs in emails and automatically unsubscribe people without them knowing. 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.
- RomanPushkin 6y agoAny way you can unsubscribe me from snail mail marketing in my real post box?
- astura 6y agoIf you live in the us you can opt out of a certain type of junk mail from companies you don't have a relationship with: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0148-prescreened-credit-and-insurance-offers https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0148-prescreened-credi...
- codecutter 6y agoI called 1-888-5-OPTOUT and told all 3 credit agencies to stop sending me pre-approved offers. Since then, junk postal mail is almost zero.
- needle0 6y agoBtw, how specific is the American CAN-SPAM act in terms of how the unsubscribe link should work? In my country I sometimes get emails with unsubscribe links that require you to log in first, which can be a pain to pull out the credentials when you don't really remember signing up for it in the first place. Does CAN-SPAM specify, say, that an unsubscribe link 1)must not require a login? 2)must lead to completion of the subscribe process within x steps?
- wincy 6y agoIt’s even worse if someone else erroneously uses your email address, thus making it virtually impossible to unsubscribe from the mailing list.
- kwhitefoot 6y agoI use filters in Thunderbird to just delete them when they arrive if marking them as spam doesn't work.
- Scaless 6y agoYes, what they're doing is illegal. [1] § 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; [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/316.5 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/316.5
- sleepydog 6y agoI recently opted out of one where they gave me a list of opt-out choices, with the default being "I still wish to receive this information". If I was on autopilot I would have submitted it. It seems to follow the letter of the law but feels pretty sleazy.
- nuker 6y agoIf you disable "load remote content" in your email client, all spam eventually stops.
- capableweb 6y agoWhere you gotten that idea from? Don't think this is true. I've never worked at a company that stopped sending emails because the trackers didn't work, and I haven't had remote content enabled for 15 years and I still get spam. Is it maybe supposed to be a joke? Went past me in that case.
- nuker 6y ago> Where you gotten that idea from? From my and my friends personal experience.
- gregmac 6y agoAs someone with this disabled for 15+ years on lots of different accounts/domains/services: this is definitely not the case. 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.
- s4n1ty 6y agoLooks interesting. I've been using https://33mail.com/ https://33mail.com/ to solve this problem for a few years, seems like this service might be complimentary. 33mail was created by my brother and currently handles about 3.2 million emails per month. Instead of signing up with your real email address, you just create an alias like foo@s4n1ty.33mail.com and use that (where "foo" may be the name of the website, or anything else you make up). 33Mail forwards any emails directly to your normal email account, but if you start getting spammed then you can block the alias. It has the added benefit that if your email alias finds its way on to an email spammers' list then you know who gave it to them. The basic service is free but if you want additional features like a custom email domain you can sign up for a premium account for $1/month.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoYour pricing is off, unless your target market is millionaires - even though I doubt they have problems with emails
- aerovistae 6y agoI'm not sure I understand. If I wasn't going to use my email, why would I care if it unsubscribed or not? What's the difference between this and just using a fake email?
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoI think you misunderstand. You don’t give out this email to websites. You forward an email from your inbox to them, and they’ll unsubscribe for you.
- aerovistae 6y agoohhh got it, thanks.
- IgorPartola 6y agoIs there some way to add this as some kind of browser extension? I can totally see using this for people’s parents as long as they just get a big fat unsubscribe button in their UI.
- glokk 6y agoYou can use an email alias service to create a different email address for each service. You can just disable or remove this address to unsubscribe from a service. SimpleLogin, 33mail do that.
- herostratus101 6y agoThe pricing for this is ridiculous. Far easier to just unsubscribe + report to spam + set a filter if that doesn't work. This takes almost no time for me currently because I unsubscribe diligently.
- anuila 6y agoYou’re giving spammers too much credit. If the email doesn’t contain a clear unsubscribe email I just click Spam, because that’s what it is.
- bertman 6y ago>At this time, the only processor is my high-school sister. I pay her $15/hour. I lol'ed. Also, I like your idea and you philosophy [0]. Good luck! [0] https://radious.co/philosophy.txt https://radious.co/philosophy.txt
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThis reminds me of an article maybe ten years back on how to a static email can change its appearance when it’s forwarded so as to hide the unsubscribe button so forwardees can’t unsubscribe (accidentally or otherwise) the forwarder. As I recall, there were a few different solutions that were each specific to the mail client doing the forwarding (using css that matches the DOM structure of the forwarded content). 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.
- AntonyGarand 6y agoThis one perhaps? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5327469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5327469 Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20171003162605/https://litmus.com/blog/preventing-unsubscribes-in-forwarded-emails https://web.archive.org/web/20171003162605/https://litmus.co...
- ComputerGuru 6y agoI vaguely remember this article but I don’t think it’s the one, as I distinctly recall mention of MS Outlook and how it wraps quotes (which means it’s maybe older than this article). It was also longer and more technical.
- AntonyGarand 6y agoAmong the post, this article[0] is referenced, which does mention testing on outlook and is more technical! It might be it. > It turns out that all email services take your original message and conveniently wrap it in a div (with a class) or a blockquote, meaning you can use that as a CSS selector. It's so stupidly simple. I wonder how the situation evolved from a decade ago. Time to do a bit of research! 0: https://web.archive.org/web/20160903225343/http://jonathan-kim.com/2011/programmatically-customizing-a-forwarded-email/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160903225343/http://jonathan-k...
- glokk 6y agoAnother solution is to create a different email address for each website/newsletter. This can be done quite easily with services like SimpleLogin or 33mail. This solution also makes this harder to track you online, therefore protect your privacy.
- TylerE 6y agoThe biggest problem I have is “legitimate” communications from companies I have nothing to do with. 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
- AntonyGarand 6y agoWhile I do see the value of such a service, I wouldn't trust anyone with unsubscribe links I receive. 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
- saimiam 6y agoThe site says that the processor is the creator's high schooler sister. What's to stop someone from buying credits and sending the processor nsfw content? Personally, I'd be really uncomfortable opening up a service like this with underage family members involved. Why not MTurk?
- MatthewElvey 6y agoNice philosophy. Typo: battle-tested, not battled-tested.
- inetknght 6y agoRequiring users to unsubscribe from something that they didn't explicitly opt-in to in the first place is the wrong approach. Services which spam users in such a fashion are malicious.
- jchook 6y agoI solved the spam problem by using a different email address every time I sign up for something. 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
- lights0123 6y agoAbine's Blur has been doing this for a few years: https://dnt.abine.com/#feature/masking https://dnt.abine.com/#feature/masking It supports masked phone numbers and credit card numbers as well.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jchook 6y agoYep, and there are a couple others as well including Sign-in With Apple. 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.
- ajb413 6y agoThis is awesome and I have a question that is somewhat relevant. Is there a known way to take care of marketing/up-sell disguised as "service-related" emails from Xfinity or the GrubHub marketing emails that automatically re-subscribe you every time you order food?
- whisk 6y agoSo you just click the unsubscribe button for me? I thought you will contact the company and tell them don't spam XD
- quickthrower2 6y agoGmail seems to offer this a link to unsubscribe by the way. A really cool service would be to trawl your inbox and unsubscribe from everything!
- wilt 6y agoI usually just create a mail rule that sends their email to other email addresses at the company if they make it hard to unsubscribe.