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When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in

When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the link) I’m either immediately unsubscribed from the person who sent me the email, or I’m taken to a page which seemingly MUST have a “remove me from all emails” option. The level of compliance (and they can’t even do malicious compliance!) with this is absurd. If these new rules work anything like that, they’ll be awesome. Clearly regulating behavior like this is indeed possible.

lanternfish 2y ago
I think a huge part of this is that email providers use the functional existence of that link to screen spam.
lovethevoid 2y ago
Got to love the CAN-SPAM act. It seems rare such acts would pass these days without making substantial compromises for advertisers. Which if it were up to them, we would still be looking for a tiny unsubscribe link at the very bottom in a font color that matches the background.
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  Wait wait, are you saying you don't need to do that? You and I live in different worlds
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    I don't, I just press this button (not my screenshot) https://www.badsender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/bouton-desinscription-apple-mail-ios-10.jpg https://www.badsender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/bouton-...
    - bravetraveler 2y ago
      I've pushed buttons like that and the one Google offers, to find the parties still gleefully spam. Widgets can ~lie~ mislead, you know
    - NotACop182 2y ago
      I push that button all the time and it works lie 30% of them time. Then future emails that come in don't have the unsubscribe on top.
yawaramin 2y ago
Uh, email unsubscribe links started out great but are now really bad unfortunately :'-( The mailers do all sorts of tricks to make it really difficult to ubsubscribe. Eg, you think you subscribed to one newsletter but they actually subscribe you to many different actual subscriptions with your email address, and give them slightly different names, like 'XYZ News', 'XYZ Updates', 'Stay in touch with XYZ'. Then you are forced to unsubscribe from each of these one by one, and you don't even know if you got them all; there could be more that they could spring on you later. There are now email unsubscribe services, but they don't really work either: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-email-unsubscribe-service/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-email-unsubs...
digging 2y ago
I'm super appreciative of what we have, but there's absolutely issues. CAN-SPAM specifies that the link must be clearly marked and suggests using CSS to do so, but the link is still always going to be at the bottom of the email in the smallest font used. It only matters for those of us who know to look for it; many people just have to live with the spam because they don't know it's easy to unsubscribe. Sometimes it's not even going to be underlined or distinguished at all (that may be a violation actually but I'm not going to take them to court over it). There's other dark patterns too, like certain unsubscribe pages requiring you to type/paste your email in to actually complete the process. That is 100% intentional friction, like github making you type the name of a repo into the deletion form. It should also be illegal for unsubscribing.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  You don't have to take them to court over it, but you can report them. Also most clients provide an unsubscribe button at the top too.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there. Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway. Companies generally know people aren't going to read more than maybe a sentence in a given email. I can get to most unsubscribe buttons without even scrolling. If I do scroll, it's like 3 scroll wheel notches.
  - chiggsy 2y ago
    >I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there. Yes, because after a century of public relations and marketing you expect fine print to be in these locations because you have been marketed to from infancy, which has made you apparently, forget that today's dark pattern creators stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the fact that you expect that stuff to be there is because your worldview has been successfully engineered. Important links under the fold, aka the first page are there to be overlooked. What they want from YOU is top of the page. >Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway. Careful with that kind of thinking, marketing works on everybody. A seed is planted, by appealing to emotional arguments. If it takes root, then your worldview starts to change, via rationalization. The smarter you are, the better and more subtle your rationalizations and better it works. This project of social engineering was given to a guy named Edwin Bernays, who wrote several very plain and easy to read books on how he was going to do this project. First one was "The Engineering of Consent."
justinpombrio 2y ago
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually. They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.
- ksd482 2y ago
  What I have noticed companies do is resume emails after a year or so. They probably think people would forget about unsubscribing them after a year, and for the most part they are right. If I catch any of these email lists not respecting my unsubscribing, I immediately mark them as "spam". Gmail then doesn't send them to my inbox anymore. I don't think just one person marking them as spam hurts them, but at least I feel gratified and my ego is satisfied.
  - inetknght 2y ago
    > I immediately mark them as "spam". Ahh yes, the feel-good response that Google gives you without doing anything substantial to prevent spam from reaching you in the future.
    - armada651 2y ago
      If you were using self-hosted e-mail everywhere, then it would be quite obvious that large providers like Google do massively benefit from those user reports when filtering spam.
    - kemitche 2y ago
      What makes you say that? In my experience, the spam button works fantastically. There is a gym of some kind that has me on their mailing list, refuses to honor unsubscribe, and sends me probably 2-6 emails a month. They've been doing this for years, but Google correctly gets every single one into spam because I marked one (several?) as spam years ago. Most, if not all, political junk email also ends up in my spam folder after judicious use of the spam button a few years ago.
dyno12345 2y ago
there's a particular car rental company that I can't get off their list because it error 500's when I click the unsubscribe button
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  Keep trying! Their server is just a little slow, and can only handle about 1 request per second, gets flooded "sometimes," understandable
itsdrewmiller 2y ago
I don’t think regulation has much to do with their excellence at all - it’s largely ESPs competing to provide a better mailbox experience and using things like that and spf/dkim/dmarc conformance to reduce spam.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > I don’t think regulation has much to do with their excellence at all If there is no regulation, the government is at fault If regulation doesn’t work, government is at fault And if it works, they still don’t get the credit
danaris 2y ago
Unfortunately, it's not foolproof. During the ~20 years that my predecessor in my current job worked in it, it gradually evolved from being primarily a hardware position with a little software development to primarily a software position with a little hardware building. My moderate expertise with electronic hardware helped get me the job, but then I basically never had to use it in the ~15 years I've been here. I still get multiple emails from Electronic Design daily. No amount of attempting to unsubscribe stops them. I've blocked multiple sending email addresses; they rotate them fairly frequently. It's possible I could report them for this (I haven't researched it), but since I think my spam filter has missed maybe 1-2 emails in all that time, it tends not to be worth it.
- Bjartr 2y ago
  Report them here https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ The FAQ confirms this is the correct place to report email spam https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/faq https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/faq
inetknght 2y ago
> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. The sheer number of comments that think the state of "unsubscribe" is good is... saddening. I should not have to click a link to "unsubscribe" from something that I did not subscribe to. There's no recourse for me against these thieves.
- Bjartr 2y ago
  The state of Unsubscribe is good. Imagine how much worse things would be if legit businesses had no reason to make it easy to unsubscribe in such a consistent way like we do today. That other problems also exist doesn't mean this solution for this thing isn't good.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Sure, but imagine how much better it would be if any business (legit or not) could not send marketing emails to us at all without our prior, affirmative, non-coerced consent. The state of Unsubscribe is better than what it was before the laws around it went into effect, but it doesn't go far enough.
    - consteval 2y ago
      This, to me, is a technical problem. The issue is the design of email means that it's vulnerable to spam. If someone knows your email, you WILL get spam. There's technical workarounds, too. Like unique emails for each and every service.
  - bjoli 2y ago
    I Had an issue with sixt (car rental). To unsubscribe I had to send a copy of my friggin passport to an address in Germany. I instead used GDPR to request a removal of all my data. That worked.
  - ironmagma 2y ago
    It's okay. Sometimes when you click the Unsubscribe link you have to enter your email (log in), and sometimes you have to fill out a form, which may or may not be serviceable. There is room for dark patterns here, and dark patterns are used. We're hardly out of the woods with Unsubscribe.
afh1 2y ago
In my experience "unsubscribe" emails often do not work at all. SimpleLogin is the only way.
- Bjartr 2y ago
  We must interact with very different businesses, "unsubscribe" not working is an extremely rare thing for me to encounter. Maybe once or twice a year out of using it dozens of times.
hnburnsy 2y ago
>There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email... The loophole is that companies now claim that the email is 'service' related as part of your 'account relationship' so you cannot unsubscribe at all, even though it clearly is for marketing and promotion.
- maccard 2y ago
  That’s what the report spam button is for.
  - nvr219 2y ago
    And what masked emails are for. I use this with fastmail and my own domain, it’s amazing.
  - orev 2y ago
    That doesn’t work well when you actually do need to receive emails from them once in a while. Equifax abuses this to the extreme, with every single change to your credit usage triggering an “account related” alert. But you still need to allow them for that one time they actually send a useful alert.
    - joquarky 2y ago
      It seems like we have all the tools we need to filter email with classification by language models.
- internet101010 2y ago
  Such as loyalty programs you apparently automatically signed up for when you shopped at a store.
- grigri907 2y ago
  Agreed. I get daily emails from Salesforce/Tableau that start, "this is a non-promotional email," as if those magic words cleanse anything that follows.
paradox460 2y ago
Until the link tries to redirect through their click tracking service, and is blocked by my firewall. Really dislike that Imo it should be a single header that points to a url that accepts a post payload. Email clients could then surface the link
- Ciunkos 2y ago
  There is already a header for that: List-Unsubscribe with the URL, and the List-Unsubscribe-Post to support one-click unsubscribes, which Google and Yahoo began enforcing for bulk senders in February this year.
  - paradox460 2y ago
    Ah, nice to hear. That is progress.
nijave 2y ago
There is additional incentive here. Companies that make it hard to unsubscribe risk being reported as spam which impacts their deliverability. It's in company's best interest to allow a straight forward opt out or risk getting blocked.
bearjaws 2y ago
... Except it clearly works and I've unsubscribed from 99% of emails without ever going to their site?
uoaei 2y ago
Another trick I've noticed is to use the unsubscribe link as a redirect to a (surprise?) non-functioning webpage. "Sorry, please contact the account administrator to unsubscribe."
nvr219 2y ago
The best part about requiring them to use the word “unsubscribe” is I can do this email rule: If an email says “unsubscribe” in it, move it to “says-unsubscribe” folder. I look at that email once a week for the false positives. Huge QoL increase.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  This is brilliant. You can shunt all the brand email into a single folder.
andrewla 2y ago
The big difference here is that this was created by an act of Congress, not the result of a regulatory body straining at the limits of its remit. That makes it much more likely to survive administration changes or court challenges. Even now the CAN-SPAM act feels outdated -- I do like the unsubscribe button, but I would like to see email verification made explicitly required. That in order to start emailing you, you need to send an initial engagement email saying that the organization wants to start emailing you, and requiring you to actively opt-in to emails rather than just start sending them. This would both cut down on marketing spam as well as mistaken email addresses. Most reputable websites do email verification where you have to enter a code or click on a link, but I have a surprising number of emails that get sent to me even though I am not the person the emails were aimed at.
- advisedwang 2y ago
  > regulatory body straining at the limits of its remit The FTC's establishing laws make "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce" unlawful and give them power to regulate that. It doesn't seem to be straining at the limits of remit to rule that making it hard for people to end a subscription is unfair/deceptive.
  - andrewla 2y ago
    To whom is this "unfair"? A business has a legitimate interest in preventing customers from taking advantage of bulk discounts (committing to a long term of service in exchange for lower prices), and customers have a legitimate interest in opting to discontinue a service that is no longer needed. Where to draw that line does not seem cut and dry to me. What is the specific nature of the "deception" -- what claim was made, and how is it not being honored? Don't get me wrong -- I've been bit by this and I hate it and I think Lina Khan has done wonders for antitrust enforcement and I wish that she would take it even further, but the proper body to address this is Congress, through legislation rather than regulation.
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
      Paying in advance for a bulk subscription is not the same as an "auto renew", and I think you know that.
kelnos 2y ago
I agree for the most part, but I've still had lots of problems with them. I've found unsubscribe links that go to domains that don't resolve, or to pages that 500 or 404. I've hit unsubscribe pages where tapping the unsubscribe button doesn't actually do anything. I run into one of these once every few weeks or so. Despite the requirement for a link in the email, of course they're going to put it at the bottom, using a smaller font, often with a font color that's closer to the background color. This is garbage. Instead we should have a standard for an email header that specifies how to unsubscribe, so that email clients can present their own unsubscribe button in a conspicuous place, and then unsubscribe the recipient without any extra interaction required. And if these links fail to work too many times, the email provider can use this as a signal to stop accepting mail from that sender entirely. (And we do have this standard header! It's called List-Unsubscribe-Post.) But this still doesn't really go far enough. I want a full ban on sending me unsolicited marketing emails. Signing up for an account somewhere should not mean they're allowed to send me marketing emails, and any checkboxes authorizing that along the way should be initially unchecked. And they shouldn't be able to dark-pattern me into checking them by making it look like a required consent type checkbox. Absent that, any entity that wants to market to me should have to send me an initial email confirming that I indeed want to receive their marketing emails. If I do not reply, that's considered lack of consent, and then they should not be able to try again, at all, forever.
renewiltord 2y ago
This really points to California being the capital of the United States. Everything happens here first and the rest of the nation then follows. Amazing.
xnx 2y ago
Gmail "Report Spam" is my unsubscribe link. It's even got its own hotkey "!".
dev1ycan 2y ago
This is not the case though, I click unsubcribe from the IEEE trashcan spam email and they ask me to login to their website to unsubscribe, wtf.
tshaddox 2y ago
I've always wondered how Vanguard gets away with this. They send a lot of promotional emails that all say this near the bottom of the message: > Because you're a valued Vanguard client, we thought you'd be interested in this information. If you prefer not to receive emails of this type, simply email us. Please do not reply to this message to opt out. > The material in this message is promotional in nature. No unsubscribe link.
- dpkirchner 2y ago
  Interesting -- they do send a List-Unsubscribe header with an unsubscribe link that seems to work (and contains a JWT, curious), but no regular HTML link.
asdf123qweasd 2y ago
There is malicous compliance. They can create new email categories, to which you are auto "resubscribed" - you validating that the email is used and has a reader that reads the emails and cleans his mailbox is worth a buck. Then you hovering over topics you might be interested before unsubscribng gives away preferences.
xivzgrev 2y ago
It’s amazing what penalties can do Can spam provides for up to $50k PER EMAIL in civil penalties. If you make 1 cent or $10 per email, doesn’t matter. It’s no where close to that level of penalty. So you make damn sure you don’t ruin yourself. Now we just need that kind on text messaging - it’s a Wild West these days
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. The general problem is that the government is miserable at drafting things. Even take the regulation you like: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... > "Your message must include your valid physical postal address." WTF? They can't just pass a simple rule that says you need a working unsubscribe link, they have to include some arduous nonsense that requires small businesses to pay for a PO box so they don't have to publish their home address in every email. Nobody wants to unsubscribe by postal mail. But decades later the requirement is still there. So then businesses oppose every new rule because the government can't refrain from making them pointlessly onerous.
notfed 2y ago
And can I point out how unreasonably difficult it is to prevent physical/paper spam? It blows my mind that our email laws are more restrictive than physical mail.
mind-blight 2y ago
I've started receiving emails that say 'reply "unsubscribe" to stop receiving emails' rather than have an unsubscribe link. This just started happening a few months ago, so I think this is a workaround that someone figured out. I've started blocking all of them and sending straight to spam.
syedkarim 2y ago
Why do unsubscribe-regulations work so well? What is the punishment for not complying and is enforcement particularly swift?
- andy81 2y ago
  It's not just the regulation. It's the knowledge that users will mark your messages as junk if there's no easy unsubscribe button. With the re-centralization of email, reputation score in Outlook/Gmail is critical.
orourke 2y ago
In the case of unsubscribe links I think it’s more about having your sending reputation destroyed by ISPs because they will penalize you heavily if people have to use the spam button to unsubscribe. Our company makes it as easy as possible and practically encourage people to unsubscribe because of this.
jdyer9 2y ago
Except Walgreens. They say unsubscribe and then they just don't do it.
mattmaroon 2y ago
Well, the workaround to unsubscribe is just spam. It’s hard to argue that I get effectively fewer emails as a result of those regulations, even though I like them. I just get effectively infinite emails. There’s no effective difference between 10,000 spam emails a day and 11,000. The fact that Banana Republic actually stops sending me email when I tell them to is nice (for me and them really) but not practically meaningful. To the extent that I see anything other than spam email it’s just because of spam filters not anything regulatory. If you don’t believe me just run an email server with no spam filter. This regulation might actually be better though because it applies to only services users have given a credit card to. Those services are thus 100% dependent on access to the federal banking system, which can easily be revoked.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
The laws are not unreasonably great. There is no actual blocker to them spamming you again. There’s many ways to maliciously comply like opting you out of a tiny category of their email and making that less obvious so they can keep emailing you unwanted spam. And the law doesn’t let you take them to court for abusing you. That’s why platforms like Bandwidth.com and Sinch have so many spammers as customers - it’s just revenue for them.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
The problem is email regulations prevent you, the individual, from taking them to court for spamming you. As I recall only the government (like DOJ) can file a case for spam. Basically the US law was actually a bad compromise for everyday users
rkho 2y ago
> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. > There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. My spam folder constantly receiving new messages from political campaigns under new lists and org names begs to disagree. One donation in 2008 and I'm simply trapped in the system with no recourse. Seems like the rules selectively don't apply to certain classes.
tumblrinaowned 2y ago
Why don't you blame YC for this? They fund and repeatedly promote this AI email slop. There is a startup called AI SDR that send random emails who have no context. Same with Resend. Start at home before blaming others or screaming at the sky.
- tumblrinaowned 2y ago
  Oh look. Weasel boys got offended and now complaning to mommy - he was mean.
nox101 2y ago
this is not my experience. for me, clicking the unsubscribe link is basically confirmation to them that the email address they sent their spam too is a legit email address. Further, often I get the "okay, we'll remove you within 30 days" bs
exe34 2y ago
I prefer to click spam, because as I understand it, it hurts their reach in the future.
e40 2y ago
UCSD has me on a bunch of lists as a former parent of an undergraduate. No way to unsubscribe. Infuriating.
scott_w 2y ago
> When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible I suspect that people who say this have no experience of European-like systems which work on the basis of regulating things to prevent them from becoming an issue. A huge part of this is to make sure the regulators have clear guidance and the teeth to enforce regulation. Take, for example, the UK's Health and Hygiene regulator. They have the power to inspect premises and processes and force proprietors to make their ratings visible. In extreme cases, they can shut down an establishment for non-compliance. Is it 100% perfect? Obviously not, people still get food poisoning or swallow glass in their food. That said, it's not common, and you can easily avoid 1* establishments. If someone isn't displaying their star rating, it's obvious why and you can easily avoid them, too.
dmix 2y ago
Not being blacklisted as spam is a huge market based incentive to add unsub links. A major reason for the mass adoption is that most companies use email services because running your own marketing email servers are extremely difficult. And those companies don't allow you to send emails without one to protect their own email servers in addition to following the various laws in different countries. It's easier to get compliance via these larger companies, particularly when it naturally aligns with market incentives. Regulating a million niche SaaS sites each with an individual custom payments page may be quite a bit harder. But maybe stuff like Stripe will make it easier as a proxy for this regulation.
tonylemesmer 2y ago
Doesnt seem to apply to Experian
wildzzz 2y ago
The Unsubscribe links are so good now because all of those newsletters use the same handful of email marketing services. It's pretty much impossible to run your own email marketing campaign without them, you'll get sent right to everyone's Gmail spam box. Because those services are so big, they'll follow the CAN-SPAM act. What legitimate marketer wants to pay money for a service that's going to send your emails to spam boxes and potentially get you in trouble with the FTC? Despite Google making it difficult to run your own email server and doing a bunch of other fucked up shit, the centralization of email has produced a few good outcomes. Now if we could only have the same level of control over the junk mail in our physical mail boxes.
mapt 2y ago
A smart person could think of dozens of ways around any explicit legalistic regulation intended to protect consumers, given an afternoon. Ultimately every regulation needs an uncaptured civil service regulator who can take offense at somebody trying to perform cheeky workarounds and impose disproportionate punitive measures & regulatory adjustments when the spirit of the law is violated. If you don't have that (and we don't, in many areas), then you don't have effective government. This is why the Federalist Society going after Chevron deference is part of an attempt to overthrow the government; If the iterative regulatory loop demands a full appellate process followed by getting half the votes in the House, 60+ votes in the Senate, and one vote in the White House, then no regulation will be performed in practice. Virtually everything the FTC does is now subject to Federalist Society veto given sufficient time for the lawsuits to be filed & processed.
efitz 2y ago
FTC rule is doomed to failure. I'm working with a state lawmaker in my state to try to get a law to this effect passed, but I'm asking him to write into the law an individual cause of action. In other words, I don't want people to have to wait for the state attorney general to take notice and decide to act (or the FTC in the case of this article). I want the affected user to be able to go to small claims court and sue for $500 or $1000 or whatever. I believe this will be much more effective as it forces the abuser to have to defend themself in court all over the place (at significant cost) or lose all over the place (at significant cost) or stop abusing.
robomartin 2y ago
> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. While I generally agree with your opinion, the case is that bad actors are using the unsubscribe link to identify real email addresses. The vast majority of people do not match what I imagine might be the average HN tech-savvy audience. They get an email they don't want and click on "Unsubscribe" to get rid of it. What they don't know is that they have been added to a database of "live" emails to be sold and reused for all sorts of purposes from that point forward. In other words, as is the case for many laws, they keep honest people honest. You do not control criminals with laws until the result of the law is that they end-up in prison (or whatever the appropriate punishment might be). I ran an experiment during the last presidential election (US). I used two separate throw-away emails to subscribe to updates from both the Republican and Democratic parties. I used these emails directly on the main organization pages. I also setup filters to sort all incoming emails into two separate folders. A year later I deleted both email accounts and the tens of thousands of messages on both folders. It was an interesting game of whack-a-mole. Clicking on "unsubscribe" had no real effect. Both parties passed this email to, it seemed, everyone except for the local school janitor. It was nothing less than insane. There was no effective way to make it stop. I unsubscribed from both main organizations. That did nothing at all. My conclusion was that, while "Unsubscribe" sounds good and looks useful, it only works with non-criminal organizations (sorry, I consider political parties to be at the threshold of being criminal organizations). It's like a lock on a door, or, to use a more provocative example, a gun. The laws surrounding these things only get respect from honest law-abiding people. A criminal will gladly take a crowbar to your door-lock and break into your home, or use a gun to do the same or worse. Going back to unsolicited emails (and by extension SMS), not sure how we fix this in real terms. It's a really difficult problem.
valval 2y ago
I think blocking traffic from a domain into your inbox would be a better way to handle this without regulation.

lanternfish 2y ago

I think a huge part of this is that email providers use the functional existence of that link to screen spam.

lovethevoid 2y ago

Got to love the CAN-SPAM act. It seems rare such acts would pass these days without making substantial compromises for advertisers. Which if it were up to them, we would still be looking for a tiny unsubscribe link at the very bottom in a font color that matches the background.

IggleSniggle 2y ago
Wait wait, are you saying you don't need to do that? You and I live in different worlds
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  I don't, I just press this button (not my screenshot) https://www.badsender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/bouton-desinscription-apple-mail-ios-10.jpg https://www.badsender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/bouton-...
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    I've pushed buttons like that and the one Google offers, to find the parties still gleefully spam. Widgets can ~lie~ mislead, you know
  - NotACop182 2y ago
    I push that button all the time and it works lie 30% of them time. Then future emails that come in don't have the unsubscribe on top.

yawaramin 2y ago

Uh, email unsubscribe links started out great but are now really bad unfortunately :'-( The mailers do all sorts of tricks to make it really difficult to ubsubscribe. Eg, you think you subscribed to one newsletter but they actually subscribe you to many different actual subscriptions with your email address, and give them slightly different names, like 'XYZ News', 'XYZ Updates', 'Stay in touch with XYZ'. Then you are forced to unsubscribe from each of these one by one, and you don't even know if you got them all; there could be more that they could spring on you later. There are now email unsubscribe services, but they don't really work either: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-email-unsubscribe-service/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-email-unsubs...

digging 2y ago

I'm super appreciative of what we have, but there's absolutely issues. CAN-SPAM specifies that the link must be clearly marked and suggests using CSS to do so, but the link is still always going to be at the bottom of the email in the smallest font used. It only matters for those of us who know to look for it; many people just have to live with the spam because they don't know it's easy to unsubscribe. Sometimes it's not even going to be underlined or distinguished at all (that may be a violation actually but I'm not going to take them to court over it). There's other dark patterns too, like certain unsubscribe pages requiring you to type/paste your email in to actually complete the process. That is 100% intentional friction, like github making you type the name of a repo into the deletion form. It should also be illegal for unsubscribing.

lovethevoid 2y ago
You don't have to take them to court over it, but you can report them. Also most clients provide an unsubscribe button at the top too.
xboxnolifes 2y ago
I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there. Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway. Companies generally know people aren't going to read more than maybe a sentence in a given email. I can get to most unsubscribe buttons without even scrolling. If I do scroll, it's like 3 scroll wheel notches.
- chiggsy 2y ago
  >I don't really see putting important links in the footer as anti-pattern. For my entire internet life, many important links were put into the footer of a webpage. Careers, About Us, Contact Us, Locations, Citations, etc. They are expected to be there. Yes, because after a century of public relations and marketing you expect fine print to be in these locations because you have been marketed to from infancy, which has made you apparently, forget that today's dark pattern creators stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the fact that you expect that stuff to be there is because your worldview has been successfully engineered. Important links under the fold, aka the first page are there to be overlooked. What they want from YOU is top of the page. >Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway. Careful with that kind of thinking, marketing works on everybody. A seed is planted, by appealing to emotional arguments. If it takes root, then your worldview starts to change, via rationalization. The smarter you are, the better and more subtle your rationalizations and better it works. This project of social engineering was given to a guy named Edwin Bernays, who wrote several very plain and easy to read books on how he was going to do this project. First one was "The Engineering of Consent."

justinpombrio 2y ago

Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually. They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.

ksd482 2y ago
What I have noticed companies do is resume emails after a year or so. They probably think people would forget about unsubscribing them after a year, and for the most part they are right. If I catch any of these email lists not respecting my unsubscribing, I immediately mark them as "spam". Gmail then doesn't send them to my inbox anymore. I don't think just one person marking them as spam hurts them, but at least I feel gratified and my ego is satisfied.
- inetknght 2y ago
  > I immediately mark them as "spam". Ahh yes, the feel-good response that Google gives you without doing anything substantial to prevent spam from reaching you in the future.
  - armada651 2y ago
    If you were using self-hosted e-mail everywhere, then it would be quite obvious that large providers like Google do massively benefit from those user reports when filtering spam.
  - kemitche 2y ago
    What makes you say that? In my experience, the spam button works fantastically. There is a gym of some kind that has me on their mailing list, refuses to honor unsubscribe, and sends me probably 2-6 emails a month. They've been doing this for years, but Google correctly gets every single one into spam because I marked one (several?) as spam years ago. Most, if not all, political junk email also ends up in my spam folder after judicious use of the spam button a few years ago.

dyno12345 2y ago

there's a particular car rental company that I can't get off their list because it error 500's when I click the unsubscribe button

IggleSniggle 2y ago
Keep trying! Their server is just a little slow, and can only handle about 1 request per second, gets flooded "sometimes," understandable

itsdrewmiller 2y ago

I don’t think regulation has much to do with their excellence at all - it’s largely ESPs competing to provide a better mailbox experience and using things like that and spf/dkim/dmarc conformance to reduce spam.

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> I don’t think regulation has much to do with their excellence at all If there is no regulation, the government is at fault If regulation doesn’t work, government is at fault And if it works, they still don’t get the credit

danaris 2y ago

Unfortunately, it's not foolproof. During the ~20 years that my predecessor in my current job worked in it, it gradually evolved from being primarily a hardware position with a little software development to primarily a software position with a little hardware building. My moderate expertise with electronic hardware helped get me the job, but then I basically never had to use it in the ~15 years I've been here. I still get multiple emails from Electronic Design daily. No amount of attempting to unsubscribe stops them. I've blocked multiple sending email addresses; they rotate them fairly frequently. It's possible I could report them for this (I haven't researched it), but since I think my spam filter has missed maybe 1-2 emails in all that time, it tends not to be worth it.

Bjartr 2y ago
Report them here https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ The FAQ confirms this is the correct place to report email spam https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/faq https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/faq

inetknght 2y ago

> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. The sheer number of comments that think the state of "unsubscribe" is good is... saddening. I should not have to click a link to "unsubscribe" from something that I did not subscribe to. There's no recourse for me against these thieves.

Bjartr 2y ago
The state of Unsubscribe is good. Imagine how much worse things would be if legit businesses had no reason to make it easy to unsubscribe in such a consistent way like we do today. That other problems also exist doesn't mean this solution for this thing isn't good.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Sure, but imagine how much better it would be if any business (legit or not) could not send marketing emails to us at all without our prior, affirmative, non-coerced consent. The state of Unsubscribe is better than what it was before the laws around it went into effect, but it doesn't go far enough.
  - consteval 2y ago
    This, to me, is a technical problem. The issue is the design of email means that it's vulnerable to spam. If someone knows your email, you WILL get spam. There's technical workarounds, too. Like unique emails for each and every service.
- bjoli 2y ago
  I Had an issue with sixt (car rental). To unsubscribe I had to send a copy of my friggin passport to an address in Germany. I instead used GDPR to request a removal of all my data. That worked.
- ironmagma 2y ago
  It's okay. Sometimes when you click the Unsubscribe link you have to enter your email (log in), and sometimes you have to fill out a form, which may or may not be serviceable. There is room for dark patterns here, and dark patterns are used. We're hardly out of the woods with Unsubscribe.

afh1 2y ago

In my experience "unsubscribe" emails often do not work at all. SimpleLogin is the only way.

Bjartr 2y ago
We must interact with very different businesses, "unsubscribe" not working is an extremely rare thing for me to encounter. Maybe once or twice a year out of using it dozens of times.

hnburnsy 2y ago

>There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email... The loophole is that companies now claim that the email is 'service' related as part of your 'account relationship' so you cannot unsubscribe at all, even though it clearly is for marketing and promotion.

maccard 2y ago
That’s what the report spam button is for.
- nvr219 2y ago
  And what masked emails are for. I use this with fastmail and my own domain, it’s amazing.
- orev 2y ago
  That doesn’t work well when you actually do need to receive emails from them once in a while. Equifax abuses this to the extreme, with every single change to your credit usage triggering an “account related” alert. But you still need to allow them for that one time they actually send a useful alert.
  - joquarky 2y ago
    It seems like we have all the tools we need to filter email with classification by language models.
internet101010 2y ago
Such as loyalty programs you apparently automatically signed up for when you shopped at a store.
grigri907 2y ago
Agreed. I get daily emails from Salesforce/Tableau that start, "this is a non-promotional email," as if those magic words cleanse anything that follows.

paradox460 2y ago

Until the link tries to redirect through their click tracking service, and is blocked by my firewall. Really dislike that Imo it should be a single header that points to a url that accepts a post payload. Email clients could then surface the link

Ciunkos 2y ago
There is already a header for that: List-Unsubscribe with the URL, and the List-Unsubscribe-Post to support one-click unsubscribes, which Google and Yahoo began enforcing for bulk senders in February this year.
- paradox460 2y ago
  Ah, nice to hear. That is progress.

nijave 2y ago

There is additional incentive here. Companies that make it hard to unsubscribe risk being reported as spam which impacts their deliverability. It's in company's best interest to allow a straight forward opt out or risk getting blocked.

bearjaws 2y ago

... Except it clearly works and I've unsubscribed from 99% of emails without ever going to their site?

uoaei 2y ago

Another trick I've noticed is to use the unsubscribe link as a redirect to a (surprise?) non-functioning webpage. "Sorry, please contact the account administrator to unsubscribe."

nvr219 2y ago

The best part about requiring them to use the word “unsubscribe” is I can do this email rule: If an email says “unsubscribe” in it, move it to “says-unsubscribe” folder. I look at that email once a week for the false positives. Huge QoL increase.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
This is brilliant. You can shunt all the brand email into a single folder.

andrewla 2y ago

The big difference here is that this was created by an act of Congress, not the result of a regulatory body straining at the limits of its remit. That makes it much more likely to survive administration changes or court challenges. Even now the CAN-SPAM act feels outdated -- I do like the unsubscribe button, but I would like to see email verification made explicitly required. That in order to start emailing you, you need to send an initial engagement email saying that the organization wants to start emailing you, and requiring you to actively opt-in to emails rather than just start sending them. This would both cut down on marketing spam as well as mistaken email addresses. Most reputable websites do email verification where you have to enter a code or click on a link, but I have a surprising number of emails that get sent to me even though I am not the person the emails were aimed at.

advisedwang 2y ago
> regulatory body straining at the limits of its remit The FTC's establishing laws make "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce" unlawful and give them power to regulate that. It doesn't seem to be straining at the limits of remit to rule that making it hard for people to end a subscription is unfair/deceptive.
- andrewla 2y ago
  To whom is this "unfair"? A business has a legitimate interest in preventing customers from taking advantage of bulk discounts (committing to a long term of service in exchange for lower prices), and customers have a legitimate interest in opting to discontinue a service that is no longer needed. Where to draw that line does not seem cut and dry to me. What is the specific nature of the "deception" -- what claim was made, and how is it not being honored? Don't get me wrong -- I've been bit by this and I hate it and I think Lina Khan has done wonders for antitrust enforcement and I wish that she would take it even further, but the proper body to address this is Congress, through legislation rather than regulation.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    Paying in advance for a bulk subscription is not the same as an "auto renew", and I think you know that.

kelnos 2y ago

I agree for the most part, but I've still had lots of problems with them. I've found unsubscribe links that go to domains that don't resolve, or to pages that 500 or 404. I've hit unsubscribe pages where tapping the unsubscribe button doesn't actually do anything. I run into one of these once every few weeks or so. Despite the requirement for a link in the email, of course they're going to put it at the bottom, using a smaller font, often with a font color that's closer to the background color. This is garbage. Instead we should have a standard for an email header that specifies how to unsubscribe, so that email clients can present their own unsubscribe button in a conspicuous place, and then unsubscribe the recipient without any extra interaction required. And if these links fail to work too many times, the email provider can use this as a signal to stop accepting mail from that sender entirely. (And we do have this standard header! It's called List-Unsubscribe-Post.) But this still doesn't really go far enough. I want a full ban on sending me unsolicited marketing emails. Signing up for an account somewhere should not mean they're allowed to send me marketing emails, and any checkboxes authorizing that along the way should be initially unchecked. And they shouldn't be able to dark-pattern me into checking them by making it look like a required consent type checkbox. Absent that, any entity that wants to market to me should have to send me an initial email confirming that I indeed want to receive their marketing emails. If I do not reply, that's considered lack of consent, and then they should not be able to try again, at all, forever.

renewiltord 2y ago

This really points to California being the capital of the United States. Everything happens here first and the rest of the nation then follows. Amazing.

xnx 2y ago

Gmail "Report Spam" is my unsubscribe link. It's even got its own hotkey "!".

dev1ycan 2y ago

This is not the case though, I click unsubcribe from the IEEE trashcan spam email and they ask me to login to their website to unsubscribe, wtf.

tshaddox 2y ago

I've always wondered how Vanguard gets away with this. They send a lot of promotional emails that all say this near the bottom of the message: > Because you're a valued Vanguard client, we thought you'd be interested in this information. If you prefer not to receive emails of this type, simply email us. Please do not reply to this message to opt out. > The material in this message is promotional in nature. No unsubscribe link.

dpkirchner 2y ago
Interesting -- they do send a List-Unsubscribe header with an unsubscribe link that seems to work (and contains a JWT, curious), but no regular HTML link.

asdf123qweasd 2y ago

There is malicous compliance. They can create new email categories, to which you are auto "resubscribed" - you validating that the email is used and has a reader that reads the emails and cleans his mailbox is worth a buck. Then you hovering over topics you might be interested before unsubscribng gives away preferences.

xivzgrev 2y ago

It’s amazing what penalties can do Can spam provides for up to $50k PER EMAIL in civil penalties. If you make 1 cent or $10 per email, doesn’t matter. It’s no where close to that level of penalty. So you make damn sure you don’t ruin yourself. Now we just need that kind on text messaging - it’s a Wild West these days

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. The general problem is that the government is miserable at drafting things. Even take the regulation you like: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... > "Your message must include your valid physical postal address." WTF? They can't just pass a simple rule that says you need a working unsubscribe link, they have to include some arduous nonsense that requires small businesses to pay for a PO box so they don't have to publish their home address in every email. Nobody wants to unsubscribe by postal mail. But decades later the requirement is still there. So then businesses oppose every new rule because the government can't refrain from making them pointlessly onerous.

notfed 2y ago

And can I point out how unreasonably difficult it is to prevent physical/paper spam? It blows my mind that our email laws are more restrictive than physical mail.

mind-blight 2y ago

I've started receiving emails that say 'reply "unsubscribe" to stop receiving emails' rather than have an unsubscribe link. This just started happening a few months ago, so I think this is a workaround that someone figured out. I've started blocking all of them and sending straight to spam.

syedkarim 2y ago

Why do unsubscribe-regulations work so well? What is the punishment for not complying and is enforcement particularly swift?

andy81 2y ago
It's not just the regulation. It's the knowledge that users will mark your messages as junk if there's no easy unsubscribe button. With the re-centralization of email, reputation score in Outlook/Gmail is critical.

orourke 2y ago

In the case of unsubscribe links I think it’s more about having your sending reputation destroyed by ISPs because they will penalize you heavily if people have to use the spam button to unsubscribe. Our company makes it as easy as possible and practically encourage people to unsubscribe because of this.

jdyer9 2y ago

Except Walgreens. They say unsubscribe and then they just don't do it.

mattmaroon 2y ago

Well, the workaround to unsubscribe is just spam. It’s hard to argue that I get effectively fewer emails as a result of those regulations, even though I like them. I just get effectively infinite emails. There’s no effective difference between 10,000 spam emails a day and 11,000. The fact that Banana Republic actually stops sending me email when I tell them to is nice (for me and them really) but not practically meaningful. To the extent that I see anything other than spam email it’s just because of spam filters not anything regulatory. If you don’t believe me just run an email server with no spam filter. This regulation might actually be better though because it applies to only services users have given a credit card to. Those services are thus 100% dependent on access to the federal banking system, which can easily be revoked.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

The laws are not unreasonably great. There is no actual blocker to them spamming you again. There’s many ways to maliciously comply like opting you out of a tiny category of their email and making that less obvious so they can keep emailing you unwanted spam. And the law doesn’t let you take them to court for abusing you. That’s why platforms like Bandwidth.com and Sinch have so many spammers as customers - it’s just revenue for them.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

The problem is email regulations prevent you, the individual, from taking them to court for spamming you. As I recall only the government (like DOJ) can file a case for spam. Basically the US law was actually a bad compromise for everyday users

rkho 2y ago

> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. > There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. My spam folder constantly receiving new messages from political campaigns under new lists and org names begs to disagree. One donation in 2008 and I'm simply trapped in the system with no recourse. Seems like the rules selectively don't apply to certain classes.

tumblrinaowned 2y ago

Why don't you blame YC for this? They fund and repeatedly promote this AI email slop. There is a startup called AI SDR that send random emails who have no context. Same with Resend. Start at home before blaming others or screaming at the sky.

tumblrinaowned 2y ago
Oh look. Weasel boys got offended and now complaning to mommy - he was mean.

nox101 2y ago

this is not my experience. for me, clicking the unsubscribe link is basically confirmation to them that the email address they sent their spam too is a legit email address. Further, often I get the "okay, we'll remove you within 30 days" bs

exe34 2y ago

I prefer to click spam, because as I understand it, it hurts their reach in the future.

e40 2y ago

UCSD has me on a bunch of lists as a former parent of an undergraduate. No way to unsubscribe. Infuriating.

scott_w 2y ago

> When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible I suspect that people who say this have no experience of European-like systems which work on the basis of regulating things to prevent them from becoming an issue. A huge part of this is to make sure the regulators have clear guidance and the teeth to enforce regulation. Take, for example, the UK's Health and Hygiene regulator. They have the power to inspect premises and processes and force proprietors to make their ratings visible. In extreme cases, they can shut down an establishment for non-compliance. Is it 100% perfect? Obviously not, people still get food poisoning or swallow glass in their food. That said, it's not common, and you can easily avoid 1* establishments. If someone isn't displaying their star rating, it's obvious why and you can easily avoid them, too.

dmix 2y ago

Not being blacklisted as spam is a huge market based incentive to add unsub links. A major reason for the mass adoption is that most companies use email services because running your own marketing email servers are extremely difficult. And those companies don't allow you to send emails without one to protect their own email servers in addition to following the various laws in different countries. It's easier to get compliance via these larger companies, particularly when it naturally aligns with market incentives. Regulating a million niche SaaS sites each with an individual custom payments page may be quite a bit harder. But maybe stuff like Stripe will make it easier as a proxy for this regulation.

tonylemesmer 2y ago

Doesnt seem to apply to Experian

wildzzz 2y ago

The Unsubscribe links are so good now because all of those newsletters use the same handful of email marketing services. It's pretty much impossible to run your own email marketing campaign without them, you'll get sent right to everyone's Gmail spam box. Because those services are so big, they'll follow the CAN-SPAM act. What legitimate marketer wants to pay money for a service that's going to send your emails to spam boxes and potentially get you in trouble with the FTC? Despite Google making it difficult to run your own email server and doing a bunch of other fucked up shit, the centralization of email has produced a few good outcomes. Now if we could only have the same level of control over the junk mail in our physical mail boxes.

mapt 2y ago

A smart person could think of dozens of ways around any explicit legalistic regulation intended to protect consumers, given an afternoon. Ultimately every regulation needs an uncaptured civil service regulator who can take offense at somebody trying to perform cheeky workarounds and impose disproportionate punitive measures & regulatory adjustments when the spirit of the law is violated. If you don't have that (and we don't, in many areas), then you don't have effective government. This is why the Federalist Society going after Chevron deference is part of an attempt to overthrow the government; If the iterative regulatory loop demands a full appellate process followed by getting half the votes in the House, 60+ votes in the Senate, and one vote in the White House, then no regulation will be performed in practice. Virtually everything the FTC does is now subject to Federalist Society veto given sufficient time for the lawsuits to be filed & processed.

efitz 2y ago

FTC rule is doomed to failure. I'm working with a state lawmaker in my state to try to get a law to this effect passed, but I'm asking him to write into the law an individual cause of action. In other words, I don't want people to have to wait for the state attorney general to take notice and decide to act (or the FTC in the case of this article). I want the affected user to be able to go to small claims court and sue for $500 or $1000 or whatever. I believe this will be much more effective as it forces the abuser to have to defend themself in court all over the place (at significant cost) or lose all over the place (at significant cost) or stop abusing.

robomartin 2y ago

> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. While I generally agree with your opinion, the case is that bad actors are using the unsubscribe link to identify real email addresses. The vast majority of people do not match what I imagine might be the average HN tech-savvy audience. They get an email they don't want and click on "Unsubscribe" to get rid of it. What they don't know is that they have been added to a database of "live" emails to be sold and reused for all sorts of purposes from that point forward. In other words, as is the case for many laws, they keep honest people honest. You do not control criminals with laws until the result of the law is that they end-up in prison (or whatever the appropriate punishment might be). I ran an experiment during the last presidential election (US). I used two separate throw-away emails to subscribe to updates from both the Republican and Democratic parties. I used these emails directly on the main organization pages. I also setup filters to sort all incoming emails into two separate folders. A year later I deleted both email accounts and the tens of thousands of messages on both folders. It was an interesting game of whack-a-mole. Clicking on "unsubscribe" had no real effect. Both parties passed this email to, it seemed, everyone except for the local school janitor. It was nothing less than insane. There was no effective way to make it stop. I unsubscribed from both main organizations. That did nothing at all. My conclusion was that, while "Unsubscribe" sounds good and looks useful, it only works with non-criminal organizations (sorry, I consider political parties to be at the threshold of being criminal organizations). It's like a lock on a door, or, to use a more provocative example, a gun. The laws surrounding these things only get respect from honest law-abiding people. A criminal will gladly take a crowbar to your door-lock and break into your home, or use a gun to do the same or worse. Going back to unsolicited emails (and by extension SMS), not sure how we fix this in real terms. It's a really difficult problem.

valval 2y ago

I think blocking traffic from a domain into your inbox would be a better way to handle this without regulation.