7 ms·
No one-click unsubscribe? It's spam.
Your marking emails might not have a one-click unsubscribe link but Gmail certainly has a one click spam button.
Two ways you can keep me as a subscriber:
1. Remind me what the hell it is your company does/sells in the first sentence. Between my signup and now, chances are about 95% that I forgot what I even signed up for.
2. Make it easy to unsubscribe. That means a very visible one-click link. Unsubscribing doesn't mean I'm no longer interested in your product. But making it difficult to unsubscribe says a lot about how I will be treated as your customer.
<extra> Go easy on the HTML / CSS / Images. </credit>
- massarog 14y agoCompanies that make me sign in to unsubscribe, stop doing this.
- rocky1138 14y agoIf I click an unsubscribe link and the company wants me to sign in, I mark it as spam in gmail.
- csixty4 14y agoOne of the ACM's email lists makes you log in to unsubscribe, but then I can't access that section of the site because my membership lapsed. And this organization purports to represent the state of the art in this field.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoI'd like to add: 3. I shouldn't have to sign in to unsubscribe. 4. Don't auto-subscribe me to new notification types. (We're ALL looking at YOU LinkedIn.)
- _delirium 14y agoTwitter has been doing #4 aggressively as well, which is a bit disappointing, since somehow I assumed they were better about netiquette than LinkedIn is.
- nwh 14y agoTwitter is horrible at that. Every few weeks they add a new notification type that you have to unsubscribe from, lest you get hit with another "newsletter" every few hours.
- spenvo 14y agoLinked-In has the spammiest email protocol out of any service I have ever used. Even after signing-in there is no one-click-to-unsubscribe button (they split it into about 12 scattered categories), and they create new categories periodically and opt you in to them. This is downright deceitful. Pro tip: change your email to one that you never use. It literally came down to doing this or deleting my Linked-in account--unfathomable to me. Also: no more f@#$!ng emails at 4 in the morning. This seems like a jackpot CAN-SPAM class action suit. @easternmonk: That's the thing -- I did mark them as spam in GMail. I assumed it would block future emails from Linked-in but not the case. ... Somehow they continued to come in. @sehugg: That too! I complained about their this on Facebook and I had friends (yes, plural) who had deleted their account because of the spam and yet were still receiving it. Unbelievable
- 3amOpsGuy 14y agochange your email address with them to myoriginalusername+linkedin@whatever.com Filter with gay abandon.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoCame to leave this comment, not disappointed someone beat me to it.
- cpursley 14y agoAgreed, spenvo! First thing I do when I sign up for a LI group is unsubscribe from all mailings (excepting a few which I chose to follow on a daily/weekly basis). The next page after signing up for a LI group should be (unchecked) opt-in checkboxes for the mailings you'd like to receive.
- drx 14y agoI agree. The other day I had to unsubscribe out of two Yahoo! Japan newsletters that suddenly started to arrive (for two different accounts I've apparently made years before). To unsubscribe I had to login to both. And for one I didn't even remember the password. Overall it took me half an hour to unsubscribe. Also if I can't unsubscribe it goes to spam.
- delackner 14y agoJapan tangent: I am amazed on a weekly basis by the mountain of spam newsletters flooding my email inbox by some of Japan's leading internet services. Total lack of respect for the customer. Physical mail today is pretty much 99% spam and 1% bills, and it looks like it might take a miracle to stop email ending up the same way.
- lt 14y agoIt's in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...
- staunch 14y agoI would not interpret "visiting a single page" to mean one-click. Of course, I agree that one-click is the right way to do things.
- 27182818284 14y agoIt is the spirit if not the letter of the law. Nobody intended someone to use 50 AJAX steps on a single page to skirt the law.
- eli 14y agoAnd, moreover, requiring a login or any personal information to unsubscribe is specifically disallowed by the law.
- mayneack 14y agoWith the important exception of an email address. Most of the time the part that annoys me the most is entering that because at best I have to check what it was sent to (many email accounts all going into one gmail) and at worst, it wasn't sent directly to me, so I have to try harder.
- rvkennedy 14y agoI think "visiting a single page" means precisely one-click. Because once click takes you to the page. Any further action, even while you're on that same page, is an additional requirement, which is disallowed.
- JacobAldridge 14y agoAlso a good reason to test your emails in different systems - Gmail often snips emails I receive, meaning the Unsubscribe link at the bottom is cut off. I'll bet that leads to increased spam reports. Aweber had an article last week suggesting you put an Unsub link at the top of your emails as well. I haven't had the guts to do that for my template (EveryDayDreamHoliday) but as a consumer I like the idea.
- chimeracoder 14y ago> Gmail often snips emails I receive, meaning the Unsubscribe link at the bottom is cut off. It also makes these emails 100% unreadable on a mobile device, because they don't include the link to the full message on phones for some reason, even though they do on their web interface.
- natmaster 14y agoI have one-click no-login unsubscribe button at the bottom of all my emails. To even get an email you have to explicitly subscribe to something. (This is not a mailing list but notification system.) Yet I still get about 1 spam report a day. I am tempted to just deactivate anyone's account that reports as spam. Is there something else I'm missing?
- Shank 14y agoYou might send an email along the lines of "continue receiving these?" every few months and offer an unsubscribe email in there, but that's all I can think of. I'd imagine that's a fairly low spam report threshold as it is.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago1 spam report per how many sent emails?
- natmaster 14y ago3000
- DanBC 14y agoI'd be interested in what the current best practice is for sending emails. For your case, do the emails start with an idiot proof line such as "This is the notification that you signed up for at example.com" ?
- natmaster 14y agoFrom is the username they subscribed to. Subject has the website url along with the the exact type of notification it is. Content is very short and sweet.
- fleitz 14y agoHaving run a mailing list I can pretty much tell you that despite your best efforts to put the right headers in so Google can do their own unsub links, unsub at top and bottom, etc, that despite all this and being fully CAN-SPAM complaint that people will still write emails to your ISP claiming that your sending SPAM. I'm not sure why but usually it's academics who send these. Maybe people sign them up for mailing lists b/c they are jerks or something. They all seem to be sure that they've never ever signed up for a mailing list. ISP sends me email about the compliance issue, I put the email address into a form that blocks it from ever being associated with any of the lists on that server, and it spits back an email detailing when they signed up, confirmed, etc, that they've been blacklisted, and then attaches a jpeg image of the headers / footers with unsub links circled in red so the ISP can close the case.
- graue 14y ago> Maybe people sign them up for mailing lists b/c they are jerks or something Not possible if you have a confirm step. And you should have a confirm step.
- polyfractal 14y agoYou would be surprised. I've run several mailing lists for both technical and non-technical people. Always, without fail, you will get someone that signs up, confirms and then mashes the spam button two emails later while sending you irate "HOW DID YOU GET MY EMAIL ADDRESS UNSUBSCRIBE ME OHGODWHATHAVEYOUDONE?!" emails. It's remarkable, really.
- graue 14y agoWell yes, forgetting that you signed up is still possible if there's a confirm step. Being signed up (maliciously or accidentally) by someone else, however, is the situation I was referring to and confirm steps exist specifically to prevent that.
- dbz 14y agoTangentially related: you can create a filter to search for emails with the word "unsubscribe" in them. Generally speaking I don't want to read anything with "unsubscribe" in it, and when I do, I have a nice folder for it.
- slig 14y agoMy Gmail won't block linkedin spam no mater how much I click on "report spam".
- zecho 14y agoCreate a filter for linkedin and send it to your spam folder.
- georgemcbay 14y agoBetter yet, create a filter for linkedin and have the filter first forward the mail to abuse@linkedin.com with a header explaining why and then throw it in the trash.
- gordian 14y agoAlso, don't send me an email afterwards letting me know I just opted out. I know that already. And why might it take 10 days to get me off your list? Do your electrons move slower than everyone else's? It's 2012!
- lucb1e 14y agoAnyone who doesn't offer a one-click-unsubscribe gets in my blocklist. This means that to every newsletter you send, you get an automatic response that I didn't care enough. I don't even see you sent the message at all. It's too bad that they're usually sent from no-reply, yes, but it's more satisfactory at least.
- zalzane 14y agoIronically enough I have more issues with getting spam text messages on my cell phone than spam email messages. It's a shame that either the CAN-SPAM act isn't enforced or doesn't apply to text messages. I'm on the national do not call list as well, and that has had seemingly no affect.
- Ironlink 14y agoAs a developer, I like to follow the rule of thumb that requests that have a persistent effect (such as changing your subscription options) should be HTTP POST rather than HTTP GET. This is in order to avoid mistakes generated by automated tools or systems which pre-fetch/cache/scan/analyze content. As such, my unsubscribe links lead to a page containing a one sentence summary of what you are about to do, and a form submit button. This does not apply to the link passed in the SMTP header List-Unsubscribe, which needs to take direct action.
- 46Bit 14y agoIt's slightly less fast, but I don't mind this. Provided you don't make me remember which email address you're sending to and just autofill it, I'll happily click all the one-button forms you like.
- eof 14y agoposted 691 days ago: but i said two clicks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2139617 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2139617
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- clay 14y agoDropbox did this recently with an email titled "Never email big files again! Share with a Dropbox link"
- xpose2000 14y agoBonus Points: If I haven't logged into your site in over 2 weeks and/or opened an email, consider me unsubscribed and stop sending me emails.
- eli 14y agoTwo weeks is ridiculous. You might as well not send a newsletter. Depending on your service, pretty much everyone on your list will, at one point or another, go two weeks without a trackable interaction. I've personally seen (opt-in) newsletter subscribers go many months without loading images or clicking a link... but send them a notice that their subscription is being turned off as a courtesy and sure enough a sizable percentage click the "keep me subscribed" button.
- PeterisP 14y agoHow would you know if I've opened your e-mail? Active html in emails (which would allow image-bugs to work) is disabled for most people that I know.
- greggman 14y agoMy pet peeve, companies that don't unsubscribe immediately. Apple for example says they'll unsubscribe you in 10 days. Given all the other things a company's systems can do immediately this one strikes me as spammy
- eli 14y agoMany companies say 10 days as a legal CYA (10 days is the limit imposed by CAN-SPAM Act). In practice, despite what they say, it's usually instant.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- michaelbuddy 14y agonot 10 consecutive days of course. just 10 random days in the future of our choosing.
- X-Istence 14y agoThe companies where I have noticed this it is mainly because they send so much email that the email might already be sitting in the outgoing queue waiting to be delivered...
- readme 14y agoe-how's unsubscribe link doesn't work. i've been getting spam from them for a while now, just because I wanted to post some backlinks on their articles :)
- jonathanmarcus 14y agoMeetup.com and as a result the New York Tech Meetup are egregious offenders of not providing 1-click unsubscribe. They take it another step further and make it extremely difficult to unsubscribe on the website too.
- michaelt 14y agoMeetup.com also send out "A waitlist is available for [event]" e-mails - perhaps the most unhelpful e-mail possible, and as far as I can tell the only way to turn them off is to turn off everything. Makes me thankful for gmail's filtering.
- SIULHT 14y agoBut aren't the mails which contain one-click unsubscribe links also spam because they use it to identify which email accounts are active and sell that information to other marketers?
- binarymax 14y agoThis happened to me with TripIt. A colleague invited me and they started sending me spam without any action from myself, and it was to my corporate account without an easy spam button like yahoo mail or gmail. I couldn't unsubscribe without creating an account first. I ended up emailing their corporate address notifying them they were violating CAN-SPAM and they manually removed me, and a PR contact apologised. I advised them they should give non-users a way to unsubscribe. I'm not sure if they ended up following my advice. My colleagues are loyal users, but just because your users love you doesn't mean your non-users want your email.
- cpursley 14y agoTripIt is one of the offenders for certain. The network updates are obnoxious.
- leoh 14y agoTell that to the New England Journal of Medicine, please. I have unsuccessfully tried to unsubscribe from them several times and they do not use this simple pattern.
- ahelwer 14y agoThe ACM is also really horrible. Subscription options are located in two or three hard-to-find places on the website. They kept on sending me emails somehow, and I eventually had to file a support ticket to get my account deleted.
- el_cuadrado 14y agoFYI: most SPAM feedback systems reduce your account weight ('trust score') if you tag your non-SPAM emails as SPAM. Although I agree with one-click-unsubscribe sentiment, clicking SPAM on an e-mail you subscribed for is not very productive.
- Matsta 14y agoI found it was actually easier to edit my profile then unsubscribe from SPAM crap I get from Linked in. So I changed my profile to reflect this but I still get spam everyday :( http://nz.linkedin.com/pub/matt-gascoigne/17/a25/9b6 http://nz.linkedin.com/pub/matt-gascoigne/17/a25/9b6
- jordoh 14y agoEven if you make it easy to unsubscribe (one click, no sign-in, prominent link), sending an email to any large number of people will still result in "mark as spam" being used on a surprisingly large percent of messages. Where I work, we send mail through Amazon SES, so we get digests of all the messages that have been marked as spam (stripped of identifying email headers). We see it used on (marketing) newsletters of course, but also on welcome messages; transactional messages (both the "action required to receive money" and "you owe us money" type, though the latter get marked as spam much more frequently); password reset messages; and pretty much anything else we've sent out more than some middling-to-large number of times. To help deal with this, we include a token in each message and process the digests so marking a message as spam will unsubscribe you (or disable the notification). It's not ideal from our point of view - because we are presumably getting dinged by the mail provider when someone marks a message as spam - but hopefully it helps in the long run since we don't send more messages that will likely just get marked as spam. When I mark something as spam, I'm doing it to penalize the sender. Whether they made it hard for me to unsubscribe, bought my email from someone else to spam me (hooray for "+blah" gmail aliases), or whatever else - I see it as a different action than unsubscribing. I'm not sure, however, that this difference is commonly perceived. It seems like there are a lot of people out there that use it much less judiciously. Occasionally I will mark a message as spam in Gmail and get a dialog asking if I want to unsubscribe instead of mark as spam; though I only recall this happening with messages from Google properties. It would be nice (though possibly ripe for abuse) if there was some way to let Gmail know where the unsubscribe link is in the message, so third parties could take advantage of this feature. That way the user could be a little clearer about whether they are punishing the sender, or just want the message to go away.
- polyfractal 14y agoUnfortunately, I'm pretty sure you are correct. Most people don't realize that mashing the spam button not only moves the message to the Spam label, but also alerts the ISP and ESP which causes negative repercussions for everyone. I'm fine with people hitting spam because something is legitimately spam. But hitting it because you are too lazy to click the Unsubscribe link is crappy. Or, more likely, because everyone thinks it's the same as the unsubscribe link. I'll only spam something if A) there is no unsubscribe link or B) I keep getting emails after I unsubscribe.
- Cherian_Abraham 14y agoUdemy is one of the spammiest services I have ever come across. Despite, hitting unsubscribe and going through the motions over 10 times, emailing them half a dozen times and finally deleting my account - I still get spammed. Udemy is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Spam for me.
- X-Istence 14y agoThat's an issue i've been having with NaNoWriMo, I unsubscribed and yet I continue to receive emails. Now I have simply marked them as spam.
- aroberge 14y agoDisqus has started spamming me. I signed up to it using my Google account. When it spams, it says that I can turn off notifications ... But, guess what: you can't sign in with your Google account credentials. So, I can't change the notification, and there's no way to unsubscribe when getting email.
- cpursley 14y agoErr. marketing not marking. 3. Check for spelling and grammar...
- stephen_g 14y agoOne other thing that massively annoys me - one of my email accounts is a gmail account with a fairly generic username, and people are constantly using it to sign up for things - and I'm getting some that have no way to unsubscribe (like BestBuy trying to get me to activate the antivirus subscription I never bought, or asking me to renew - I don't even live in the same country). So, if you're sending emails, please, please, put a 'I didn't sign up for this account' so I don't have to try and go to the site and reset their passwords and try to get the account deactivated. Please just have a link to immediately disassociate my email (like Gmail does).
- learn 14y agoThis happens to me all the time as well. As a "quick to anger" person this is the WORST thing you can do (un)intentionally!
- BrianEatWorld 14y agoI got stuck with marketing emails for my start-up and I take a bit of an issue with point one. How is it the sender's fault if you can't remember why you signed up for an email? As a matter of best practices, I do remind subscribers. However, it is also quite irritating to be marked as spam, when it was the user who signed up for my messages. By all means unsubscribe, but marking me as spam, especially because I use the highly spam averse Mailchimp is a mean thing to do. Its particularly mean if its just because you forgot what you signed up for.
- delackner 14y agoJust because your boss asked you to do something that many people HATE, doesn't make it better. People handing over their email address in exchange for user registration or to gain access to a trial version of your product are not interested in receiving sporadic advertising for the next N years. People are inundated by unwanted email every day, from companies that claim, like Dracula, "but you said I could come inside." Some people don't mind, but some of your target customers will already have very negative reactions to ANY marketing email, so it is incredibly important that you go out of your way to make it clear that you are trying to communicate something that will benefit the recipient, not just a sales pitch you can justify legally sending them.
- xenophonf 14y agoThis. I'm so sick of receiving marketing emails from companies to whom I sent a one-time informational query, not to mention the marketing emails sent to addresses gleaned from public directories like Jigsaw (of which I am _not_ a member).
- X-Istence 14y agoNot sure about others on HN, but for example when I come across an interesting project on HN that has a sign-up page to be reminded when they open I will sign up. I generally won't receive messages for X amount of weeks, and out of the blue I'll get an email. In that email let me know who you are, and what made you interesting enough for me to most likely sign up for your mailing list.
- darec1 14y agoAh, if you can unsubscribe with one click, maybe even without logging in. What stops evil Bert over there from unsubscribing you? Sure, there might be some (session) token involved, but that could have been sniffed or brute-forced. Actually mailing lists do it right, have the subscriber confirm his action by clicking a link in a confirmation mail or such. I think that's called double confirmation.
- abrown28 14y agoHow do you implement one-click when your customers forward your emails around and anybody could click on unsubscribe?
- mathewparet 14y ago1) No email address to be shared beyond a domain. (I can see that some sites partner together and if I register for some newsletter on one site, another site (domain) should not add me in their list, even if both the sites are run by the same company. 2) Email address to which emails are subscribed 3) A single click opt-out 4) Instant Opt-out (many sites say will opt out in XX hours and finally I forget that I unsubscribe, and again I try to unsubscribe.
- hendry 14y agoI wrote a announce list manager over here https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list.cgi https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list... that's inspired by this. Be great to get a code review.
- tom314 14y agoThe whole point is, if you make it harder to unsubscribe, people will mark you as spam, think you're even more annoying than other not-wanted mailings and even more unlikely to do business with. Compare it with a store attendee who pulls you in and doesn't let you out anymore.. You will NEVER shop there anymore even if they have stuff you like.