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> So consider the extreme case: what if the user fat-fingers an unsubscribe (without realizing) to their local electric company's e-invoices, which is what been
by wl 5y ago
> So consider the extreme case: what if the user fat-fingers an unsubscribe (without realizing) to their local electric company's e-invoices, which is what been relying on to prod them to log onto the site and pay the bill?
To name a specific example of this problem, I want Gulf Power of Florida to stop sending exactly the kind of email you speak of. Bills. Nastygrams when the person falls behind on the bills. Unwanted power saving tips. Calling the company and sending them postal mail has not helped. It all gets marked as spam these days. If they had an unsubscribe button, it wouldn't.
If the email is so damn important, they can go back to sending postal mail to the service address when someone unsubscribes.
- bo1024 5y agoI think you're trying to use two wrongs to make a right. If we're talking about things Gulf Power of Florida should do differently, then rather than add unsubscribe buttons to bills which is a bad idea, they should confirm people's email addresses before sending them email.
- wl 5y agoWhat's wrong with giving the user the ability to remove themselves from any automated emails? The alternative is being hit with the spam button. They should have confirmed their user controlled the email address, too, but why not go with both? And this is hardly confined to Gulf Power. Verizon, Spectrum, countless banks...
- bo1024 5y agoWell, I think letting people get silently charged monthly without sending them any message about it is a bad idea, even if they say they want it. Similar with not telling them about an outage to their service.
- wl 5y agoWell, then that mail is going to get legitimately marked as spam when I didn't request it, I have no business relationship with the sender, and there's no other way to make it stop. And the user is still getting silently charged because it's going to my inbox, not theirs. Unsubscribe is the alternative to the spam button. If you don't provide it, you are asking to be marked as spam, no matter how important you think the email is.
- bo1024 5y agoIf you have no business relationship with the sender, this is fixed by not sending email to unconfirmed addresses, as we discussed above.