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There should be an unsubscribe email header for newsletters. Then it could even be a feature for mail clients.
by thepete2 6y ago
There should be an unsubscribe email header for newsletters. Then it could even be a feature for mail clients.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThere is and some e-mail clients use it when it's present.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- corty 6y agoThere is, just many email marketing people leave it out to cut down on the unsubscribe rate. Subscribing has to be easy and in-the-face (like those 'helpful' popups on websites), unsubscribing has to be almost impossible. Not totally impossible, mind you, because otherwise courts get angry. Better email clients know to use the header, and e.g. gmail even asks about properly unsubscribing when marking a newsletter with that header as spam iirc.
- eli 6y agoIMHO if you don't use the header that makes it easy for people to unsubscribe then you don't get to complain about people Marking Spam instead.
- jeroenhd 6y agoGmail has this, it's in one of the dropdown menus. If you mark something with the right email header as spam, it even ask if you wish to unsubscribe instead. Spam companies often use this to check if the email address they've targeted is real because they get callbacks from legitimate users. I've only seen one or two legitimate uses of the header as far as I can remember.
- wruza 6y agoin one of the dropdown menus As if gmail ui wasn’t already obscure af. They could make “don’t want this anymore” button that uses unsubscribe header first and if it doesn’t work, mark it as spam automatically. Many shady practices would disappear at that same moment, but who cares when making six figures a year. If only email could work as a modern instant messenger - no spam, reacting to explicit and well-defined user intents, allowing file transfer without limitations that render that function useless, and delivering messages in less than a second.
- joombaga 6y agoThis isn't exactly what you proposed, but if a sender did include the list-unsubscribe header and you click "Report Spam" instead, Gmail will ask you if you want to unsubscribe as well.
- dubya 6y agoI think it used to be more prominent on gmail. Now it's a little link next to the name of the sender at the very top when the email is opened. But not all list messages have it, and for some, gmail even hides the unsubscribe link below a [Message clipped] link to the full email.
- lloeki 6y agoI’ve seen something like this on Apple Mail.
- progval 6y agoI can't tell if it's sarcasm. Just in case it is not: there is already such a standard header, it's List-Unsubscribe and it's a used by all mailing lists and "legit" ads I can think of. (And may of the "high quality" spam too.) https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8058 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8058 It is unfortunately not implemented by most email clients.
- mcv 6y agoMaybe email clients should show that unsubscribe button then. And also, when someone reports something as spam that has a legitimate unsubscribe link, offer to unsubscribe instead.