12 ms·

Gmail adding prominent 'Unsubscribe' option to marketing emails

120 points by r0h1n 13y ago

danieldk 13y ago
The reasoning sounds sane (users marking mails as spam when it is difficult to find the 'unsubscribe' link). But I cannot believe there is no ulterior motive. If users unsubscribe from businesses' mailing lists, it decreases the value of such lists and increases the value of GMail ads. So, I wonder if this isn't just a move to make an advertisement channel, from which Google extracts no revenue, less effective.
- rmc 13y ago
  Sounds like Google can't win. If they add a feature that helps people fight spam, people suspect an ulterior motive
  - wpietri 13y ago
    That's what happens when a reputation degrades. That's what reputations are for.
    - r0h1n 13y ago
      Sometimes the answers that are the simplest appear most profound. Like yours, in this case.
- err4nt 13y ago
  Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly. Consider this - the two reasons I originally signed up with Gmail were because of the large mailbox (a feature) and the much more capable spam filtering (a feature). At the time I owned my own domains and had my own choice of web mailboxes on my own site, but there was VALUE to me to pipe all of my mail through Gmail to benefit from these features and then check it there. One problem I have seen lately is the volume or automated mailings from websites that I gave my email address to _years_ ago has been increasing, and if you ever gave consent for one newsletter in 2005 it feels like you're now subscribed to their weekly update, their monthly update, special deals, hot news items, personalised suggestions, and notifications and you can only seem to unsubscribe from one _mailing_ at a time. You simply can't keep up unsubscribing from all of the people abusing your consent out there. This is a problem with Gmail addresses and non-Gmails alike today. To me is sounds like Gmail is aware of the problem and trying to solve it in a creative way -> Ubsubscribe using your mailbox, not using their settings :) To me it sounds like another feature that will keep people coming back and choosing Gmail over other mailboxes, and if that's the case then they make more money from ads in the long run :D
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    "Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly. " Don't be silly. This is hacker news. People are even cynical about self driving cars ("Now they can show ads while you drive!"). For example, I'm pretty sure the hacker news view of Calico is: "Google execs got together in a room and were talking, and realized they had a problem - people keep dying, and they can't show ads to dead people. They needed options, hence they formed a company to fight aging" Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month". In any case, Google essentially can't win. Past a certain point, you do enough stuff that some people don't like it. While you can focus on the user, and slow down how long it takes, you can't please people forever, and once they become cynical, they tend to stay that way.
    - danieldk 13y ago
      Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month". :) Don't be silly. This is hacker news. I am not cynical. I have always wondered why they haven't been more aggressive with respect to such lists. They are potential competition. And, while it would be unethical to filter such mailings, it is in their and in the user's interest to make it easy to unsubscribe from such lists. For users, so that they don't have to go through some annoying steps to unsubscribe, for them to improve their spam filter and to increase the value of GMail ads. By the way, let's not pretend that many of their choices are made to maximise ad revenue, since that is currently their main source of income. And I think it's perfectly fine. The vast majority wants free services and ads are a good way to monetise them. If you don't want ads and/or data mining, there are good alternatives for a few dollars a month.
    - phillmv 13y ago
      Honestly, it's no so much cynicism as it is skepticism. By the stage in the game, we have more than enough cause to abandon the image of a softer, gentler capitalism that we thought tech companies were going to be in the late 90s to early aughts and look at then with the same critical lens we shine on other immense, oligarchic organizations. I really love Twitch Plays Pokémon, because to my mind it illustrates so well both the beauty and the peril of any sufficiently large corpus of humans. Although at any given point in time it is moving at random, over bigger time scales it is clearly moving with some kind of intentionality. We can't say what Red is doing any given instant in time, but over the past 10 days it is clearly bent on progressing through all the goals in the game. Anyhow, Google is an advertising company. It moves ads. That is the life blood of the organization. Most big decisions are made directly by the executive team, whose intent you can ascertain directly, but lots of smaller decisions are made by thousands of other people lower on the chain. Clearly, over the long term, Google is going to optimize towards showing you more and better ads, and I think this move is oriented in that direction. As a rule of thumb, I think Google has a tendency to punish or discourage all forms of non Google advertising. On the plus side, this right now is clearly a net win for consumers. Sometimes things aren't as crappy as they seem.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I suspect the motivation is about better spam detection. Right now, users getting mail they don't want are faced with a) a familiar, easy to find "mark as spam" button and b) a hard to find unsubscribe link. This is guaranteed to generate a lot of false spam reports. Is this report of spam actually spam? Or is it just a person who just wants off something they actually signed up for? An easy way to get a better signal is to make unsubscribing as easy as reporting spam.
- laureny 13y ago
  Gmail ads have nothing to do with spam. From a purely ad perspective, Google doesn't really care if the email is spam or not: they still display ads on the side.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    This is not about spam. This is about newsletters that users subscribed to, e.g. because they were interested in a product. Now, such newsletters are very viable: often you subscribe to them when purchasing a product or getting a freebie. For many users (i.e. my parents) it is very hard to find out how to unsubscribe from them. Currently, such newsletters are very effective. Sending them doesn't cost you much (from MailChimp to DIY) and you retain a lot of users, since they find it hard to unsubscribe (or don't bother). It doesn't really matter that Google adds advertisements besides such e-mail, because if I had a list, I have already slipped my advertisement into a user's mailbox for free. Making it easy to unsubscribe from such mailings makes them less effective: it will become harder to retain a communication channel to potential customers, since more of them will unsubscribe. So, Google Ads become more attractive as an advertisement tool, evenmore because users cannot unsubscribe them (short of using an ad blocker).
    - vitd 13y ago
      I guess it depends on your definition of "newsletters that users subscribed to." I have never voluntarily allowed a company to add me to their mailing lists for any reason. I always carefully check or uncheck the appropriate checkboxes so that I don't get added to mailing lists. Yet I've ended up on literally hundreds of mailing lists over the years. Luckily, for these types of cases, where I bought something from a legit company, they honor their unsubscribes. But really, why was I subscribed without my consent in the first place? What's worse is some places will re-add you to their lists every time you buy from them again. (I'm looking at you Moviefone.com!) I already unsubscribed. Why the @$#% are you re-subscribing me? It's not effective at all. It makes me never want to use your service again, which is what I've done with Moviefone.
- egh 13y ago
  Yup. If google can clear you promotions tab out of stuff you don't care about, it makes the ads they place there more valuable. Many people, it seems, haven't noticed that google is now placing ads in your "promotions" tab that look just like email: http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/07/theres-easy-way-escape-gmails-terrible-new-email-ads/67445/ http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/07/theres-easy-way-es...
- bdcravens 13y ago
  Not everything is direct. If Google makes a higher quality email product, they get more eyeballs for their ads.
- jfoster 13y ago
  Disconnecting businesses from their users seems like it might be part of Facebook's & Google's strategy. Promotional tab in Gmail, feed curation in Facebook, personalised search (thinning organic traffic), etc. What better way to boost the performance of an advertising business? It's also usually welcomed by consumers. Quite clever, really.
stefan_kendall 13y ago
Awesome. I've been fighting to unsubscribe from things for 3 years. From catchall filters that insta-delete to battling inscrutable unsubscribe pages, I'm pretty close to no spam. I wish I could unsubscribe from everything at once.
- tgb 13y ago
  Maybe they'll allow you to search for emails that have the unsubscribe button in your archive/spam/trash and then mass unsubscribe from them.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- resoluteteeth 13y ago
  The article specifically says that the point of this is to fix the problem where people resort to marking messages as spam and thereby confusing Google's spam filter.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    Thanks. For some reason I read this completely the opposite of how it was written. Doh! In the interest of not looking more like a moron than I already do, I've deleted my original.
acangiano 13y ago
This, contrary to what people might believe, is good for online marketing and for business. Here is why: * You're much better off with a list of people who actually care about your communication and your product, rather than a list of people sort of interested or downright annoyed by you, which haven't unsubscribed because they couldn't find the link. * Less disinterested subscribers means less costs to send and maintain the list (e.g., via Mailchimp or SES). * Less spam reports which hurt your email deliverability (get enough of those and you'll be booted off sites like Mailchimp). * People will have less unwanted commercial communication overall, and will be able to focus on yours (of course I'm talking about the selected group of people who are actually interested). I welcome this change, and I say this as someone who runs a site that sends 50,000+ 'newsletter' emails per week. This to me is good news.
- tomerico 13y ago
  If this is good for them, than why no marketing email feature a prominent unsubscribe button at the top of the email? Surely it's not an original idea by Google.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Greed, mostly. And stupid short-term thinking of the "I don't care if it benefits everyone else, it doesn't benefit me now" type.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    If you use something like MailChimp (I think that's what many new businesses tend to use? I can't remember..) or one with pretty subscribe/unsubscribe page for every customer who uses the mailing list service, then the customer's customers will have the luck to enjoy opt-in/opt-out option. If your organization is still running some out-of-date, custom subscription software, then unsubscribe might be out of the question.
  - lotyrin 13y ago
    Turns out most people are dumb and self-absorbed.
- 13y ago
SmileyKeith 13y ago
I was in some A/B test of this a while back and it's awesome. Can't wait for it to be rolled out.
k3oni 13y ago
This is a good feature but the issue is that even if you unsubscribe from a mailing list some will not actually unsubscribe you. Also i found out a while back that after unsubscribing from some lists i started getting a lot of spam from all kinds of lists to which i never subscribed before which let me to believe that some mailing lists will actually release/sell their unsubscribed lists to others. Btw this was tested on brand new email accounts with only one mailing list subscribed at the time.
colkassad 13y ago
This will be nice for my common-name gmail account: <first initial>.<lastname>@gmail.com. It's fairly unusable right now because of all the newsletters Bob, Bill, Brandy, Briana, Brian, etc sign me up to.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  +1. I wish double-opt-in were written into federal law. I'm so sick of John's, Jack's, Julian's, and Justin's newsletters :-/
  - sjwright 13y ago
    +1. I have a personal email address of the form <first initial><second initial><lastname>@gmail.com and I get tonnes of misdirected mail from Sarahs, Samanthas, Sams and Sebastians. And that's with a second initial! I'm very close to moving my personal email to a vanity domain, for this reason alone. (It's also a bit smelly to rely on another company for your unique identifier.)
- sjwright 13y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/
spindritf 13y ago
They also added a "confirm subscription" button for double opt-in lists that you can use straight from your inbox without viewing the particular message. Or maybe just tested adding it. Damn, I should've used it. I though it was neat.
ck2 13y ago
Now give me a filter has unsubscribe link > mark as spam
- matthuggins 13y ago
  Just because you can unsubscribe from something doesn't mean it's spam. Your statement just means that you don't know what "spam" actually means.
  - wl 13y ago
    I do not subscribe to newsletters. Period. If an email sent to me has an unsubscribe link, it is most certainly spam.
- k3oni 13y ago
  The issue is with the ones that don't have a unsubscribe link and ask you to send them a fax or mail them to be unsubscribed.
  - sparkie 13y ago
    I think it's implying that services which you intentionally (or accidentally) subscribed to usually have a setting when you log into their service in which you can enable/disable their marketing emails. Conversely, emails you get in which you can only subscribe through a link in the email or elsewhere is almost always some shit you never signed up to, thus, spam.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  I'd love that one too. It's tiring to have to do it manually all the time.
- MitziMoto 13y ago
  Jesus, this would be awful. Not every email with an unsubscribe link is spam, not even close. Every time you hit that spam button you put the sender's business in jeopardy. As someone who relies on email to make their business work, I provide multiple unsubscribe links in all my emails, please use them!
opinali 13y ago
Here's my personal algorithm for handling commercial email that appears in my inbox: 1. If I'm highly confident it's spam, mark it as spam. (Very rare necessity singe gmail catches spam pretty well). 2. Otherwise it's something I have subscribed for, perhaps without noticing (opt-in by default from some service I have used). Look for the Unsubscribe link, click it. 2.1. If the Unsubscribe link IMMEDIATELY unsubscribes me (landing in a page that just confirms I'm already unsubscribed), ok, then just delete the email. 2.2. But if ANY additional interaction is required--choosing a reason for unsubscription, having to click another button--after finishing this, I will also punish the sender by going back to gmail and mark the email as spam.
- timdorr 13y ago
  Why is the mailer asking you why you're unsubscribing a punishable offense? Mailchimp does this by default on any of their unsubscribe pages (which come after you've been unsubscribed).
  - Drakim 13y ago
    If a service puts me on a subscription list without asking me, and then at the unsubscription page throws a questionnaire at me as to why I am unsubscribing, I take that as dishonest behavior. Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place! Depending on how completely unrelated the subscription is to whatever I signed up for (say I signed up for online image hosting, and they start sending me emails about their fantastic paid backup service) then I mark it as spam even if the unsubscribe button is easy and single-click.
    - xux 13y ago
      >Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place! You never become uninterested in something after you subscribe?
      - Drakim 13y ago
        Sure, that's another case entirely, and I wouldn't mark that as spam. I was referring only to the cases where you sign up for X and you get newsletters and whatnot that's not really related to your use of X.
Thiz 13y ago
I don't want to 'unsubscribe' telling spammers my email is valid for resell. I want to BLOCK spammers when I mark them as spammers, no matter if it is baby jesus reincarnated or if I personally subscribed to that list at the beginning unsuspecting an abusive spammer behind that mailing list. I mark dozens of mails as spam everyday and I keep getting them back by the same sender. Block means block, not unsubscribe.
- danieldk 13y ago
  The most frequent 'spam' mail that slips through the filter are conference mails (really). I have been to conferences in computational linguistics and machine learning. It is clear that some conferences are giving or selling e-mail addresses to other conferences. I don't really mind getting e-mails from related conferences, it seems that over time there has been much topic drift as my e-mail address has been handed from conference organiser to conference organiser. Unfortunately, since the conferences are all organised by separate entities, it is not possible to unsubscribe anymore. And unfortunately, this was before I started using '+' extensions to create custom addresses.
  - mpclark 13y ago
    From my experience working with the commercial (for-profit) conference sector, I've never seen any organiser hand over a list of email addies to anyone. They are jealously guarded as a core asset of the business. They do quite often (heck, all the time, in fact) do "swaps", where they will mail another org's piece to their own list in return for the same. These emails will usually seek to get you to give up your contact details in return for something (a whitepaper, an interview transcript, even the conference brochure), thus adding you to the new org's list as well. But the key point is you should always be able to unsubscribe from the first org and hear no more from them or their "marketing partners". I think most would see it as unprofessional, bad business and cavalier with regard to privacy to actually give lists of email addresses to other organisations. Of course, there are also some very big conference organisers out there, and they may well be pushing all sorts of unrelated events through their in-house lists. Once again, a simple unsubscribe should do the trick.
typicalbender 13y ago
A long time ago I created a filter that takes any message with the words "unsubscribe" and put it into a folder with the intention of writing something to go through and auto-click unsubscribe at some point.
darkstalker 13y ago
If find it silly that someone can defend spam as a legitimate "business". Spam is always undesired and must die. In general all advertising over email is just noise.
- blumkvist 13y ago
  >In general all advertising over email is just noise. care to back up your opinion with some facts? Because in my opinion majority of b2b advertising is driven by email.
- adzicg 13y ago
  lists aren't always advertising. I had a list for people who read my books and want to get early previews of new material - kind of insiders view into new thinking, more an irregular newsletter than any form of advertising. every single person manually subscribed to the list, there was never any spam, but e-mail open rates on the list have been dropping over the last few years to the point that I stopped sending it out last year. Of course, content might be at fault, but the engagement among the group that opened the e-mail was still good, so I guess this was collateral damage of the general trend in fighting circular e-mail. I read an article in HBR a few months ago that people mostly now get notifications on mobile devices, so the logical step for promotional marketing (soft spam) would I guess be to move to mobile apps. the stuff that I was sending out wasn't really suited for that, but if I started the whole thing again I'd probably do it with a mobile app.
bennesvig 13y ago
Ironic that Google+ marketing emails don't have a prominent unsubscribe button or even a one click unsubscribe option.
- dudus 13y ago
  transactional emails are not marketing emails.
lukejduncan 13y ago
THANK YOU Gmail! I tend to do quarterly purges of the periodic emails I find myself subscribed to. This is fantastic.
losvedir 13y ago
So how does this work exactly? I'd assume it just looks for a link in the email that says "Unsubscribe" and just makes that same link more prominent, but does anyone know for sure? I wonder how it identifies the link? CAN-SPAM doesn't require the link be called "Unsubscribe" - it could be "Stop Receiving Emails From Us" or something like that. Hopefully it will avoid false positives like a patio11-type informative email with a link to an article on "Limiting the Unsubscribes" or something. I ask because it seems like a useful feature and I just want to make sure that my site takes advantage of it.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
mattbarrie 13y ago
pot, kettle black how do I unsubscribe to google ads
- richbradshaw 13y ago
  http://www.google.com/settings/ads http://www.google.com/settings/ads, click Opt Out, or http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html
donbronson 13y ago
Outlook.com has been doing this for a while. Seems that GOOG took a cue from MSFT, no?
lutusp 13y ago
I'm shocked that people who regard themselves as technically sophisticated haven't figured out what clicking on an unsubscribe link actually does. 1. In principle and according to Can-Spam, all marketing e-mails should have an unsubscribe link. 2. But clicking on the link doesn't do what you think it does. 3. After you've clicked on advertiser A's link, he can't mail you again (not that some don't cheat and mail again anyway). 4. BUT -- Advertiser A can legally pass his "unsubscribe" list to advertiser B, or make it part of a widely distributed list for use by other advertisers, LEGALLY. Oh -- did I forget to mention that this is legal? Before Can-Spam, the standard advice was never to reply to a spam e-mail. But for some reason, after Can-Spam, people got the idea that it was their civic duty to click "unsubscribe" links, even though this identifies your e-mail address as read by a human, and thereby makes it a hot property in the spam business. Why don't people understand that Can-Spam just made things worse, and that otherwise nothing has changed?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Why don't people understand that Can-Spam just made things worse, CAN SPAM was an unusually honestly named federal law to preempt the restrictive anti-spam measures states were adopting and ensuring that marketers subject to US law can spam consumers. This was widely observed at the time the measure was being considered.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > This was widely observed at the time the measure was being considered. Indeed it was, even by politicians informed on the issues, but to no effect at all.
- Flenser 13y ago
  While I accept that this may be happening with more disreputable companies it hasn't been my experience. I use unique email addresses for everything I subscribe to or purchase. I've unsubscribed from several marketing mailing lists that I ended up on. The only spam I've received to any of these addresses has been due to data breaches. What companies do you know of that are doing this?
dublinben 13y ago
Is anyone else getting a completely broken SSL/TLS certificate from this site?
hendry 13y ago
Surprised no one has mentioned http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt I hope this means Gmail will now support List-Unsubscribe in their UI. Last time I checked they didn't with my own old email marketer: https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list/maillist https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list...

120 points by r0h1n 13y ago

The reasoning sounds sane (users marking mails as spam when it is difficult to find the 'unsubscribe' link). But I cannot believe there is no ulterior motive. If users unsubscribe from businesses' mailing lists, it decreases the value of such lists and increases the value of GMail ads. So, I wonder if this isn't just a move to make an advertisement channel, from which Google extracts no revenue, less effective.

rmc 13y ago
Sounds like Google can't win. If they add a feature that helps people fight spam, people suspect an ulterior motive
- wpietri 13y ago
  That's what happens when a reputation degrades. That's what reputations are for.
  - r0h1n 13y ago
    Sometimes the answers that are the simplest appear most profound. Like yours, in this case.
err4nt 13y ago
Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly. Consider this - the two reasons I originally signed up with Gmail were because of the large mailbox (a feature) and the much more capable spam filtering (a feature). At the time I owned my own domains and had my own choice of web mailboxes on my own site, but there was VALUE to me to pipe all of my mail through Gmail to benefit from these features and then check it there. One problem I have seen lately is the volume or automated mailings from websites that I gave my email address to _years_ ago has been increasing, and if you ever gave consent for one newsletter in 2005 it feels like you're now subscribed to their weekly update, their monthly update, special deals, hot news items, personalised suggestions, and notifications and you can only seem to unsubscribe from one _mailing_ at a time. You simply can't keep up unsubscribing from all of the people abusing your consent out there. This is a problem with Gmail addresses and non-Gmails alike today. To me is sounds like Gmail is aware of the problem and trying to solve it in a creative way -> Ubsubscribe using your mailbox, not using their settings :) To me it sounds like another feature that will keep people coming back and choosing Gmail over other mailboxes, and if that's the case then they make more money from ads in the long run :D
- DannyBee 13y ago
  "Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly. " Don't be silly. This is hacker news. People are even cynical about self driving cars ("Now they can show ads while you drive!"). For example, I'm pretty sure the hacker news view of Calico is: "Google execs got together in a room and were talking, and realized they had a problem - people keep dying, and they can't show ads to dead people. They needed options, hence they formed a company to fight aging" Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month". In any case, Google essentially can't win. Past a certain point, you do enough stuff that some people don't like it. While you can focus on the user, and slow down how long it takes, you can't please people forever, and once they become cynical, they tend to stay that way.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month". :) Don't be silly. This is hacker news. I am not cynical. I have always wondered why they haven't been more aggressive with respect to such lists. They are potential competition. And, while it would be unethical to filter such mailings, it is in their and in the user's interest to make it easy to unsubscribe from such lists. For users, so that they don't have to go through some annoying steps to unsubscribe, for them to improve their spam filter and to increase the value of GMail ads. By the way, let's not pretend that many of their choices are made to maximise ad revenue, since that is currently their main source of income. And I think it's perfectly fine. The vast majority wants free services and ads are a good way to monetise them. If you don't want ads and/or data mining, there are good alternatives for a few dollars a month.
  - phillmv 13y ago
    Honestly, it's no so much cynicism as it is skepticism. By the stage in the game, we have more than enough cause to abandon the image of a softer, gentler capitalism that we thought tech companies were going to be in the late 90s to early aughts and look at then with the same critical lens we shine on other immense, oligarchic organizations. I really love Twitch Plays Pokémon, because to my mind it illustrates so well both the beauty and the peril of any sufficiently large corpus of humans. Although at any given point in time it is moving at random, over bigger time scales it is clearly moving with some kind of intentionality. We can't say what Red is doing any given instant in time, but over the past 10 days it is clearly bent on progressing through all the goals in the game. Anyhow, Google is an advertising company. It moves ads. That is the life blood of the organization. Most big decisions are made directly by the executive team, whose intent you can ascertain directly, but lots of smaller decisions are made by thousands of other people lower on the chain. Clearly, over the long term, Google is going to optimize towards showing you more and better ads, and I think this move is oriented in that direction. As a rule of thumb, I think Google has a tendency to punish or discourage all forms of non Google advertising. On the plus side, this right now is clearly a net win for consumers. Sometimes things aren't as crappy as they seem.
wpietri 13y ago
I suspect the motivation is about better spam detection. Right now, users getting mail they don't want are faced with a) a familiar, easy to find "mark as spam" button and b) a hard to find unsubscribe link. This is guaranteed to generate a lot of false spam reports. Is this report of spam actually spam? Or is it just a person who just wants off something they actually signed up for? An easy way to get a better signal is to make unsubscribing as easy as reporting spam.
laureny 13y ago
Gmail ads have nothing to do with spam. From a purely ad perspective, Google doesn't really care if the email is spam or not: they still display ads on the side.
- danieldk 13y ago
  This is not about spam. This is about newsletters that users subscribed to, e.g. because they were interested in a product. Now, such newsletters are very viable: often you subscribe to them when purchasing a product or getting a freebie. For many users (i.e. my parents) it is very hard to find out how to unsubscribe from them. Currently, such newsletters are very effective. Sending them doesn't cost you much (from MailChimp to DIY) and you retain a lot of users, since they find it hard to unsubscribe (or don't bother). It doesn't really matter that Google adds advertisements besides such e-mail, because if I had a list, I have already slipped my advertisement into a user's mailbox for free. Making it easy to unsubscribe from such mailings makes them less effective: it will become harder to retain a communication channel to potential customers, since more of them will unsubscribe. So, Google Ads become more attractive as an advertisement tool, evenmore because users cannot unsubscribe them (short of using an ad blocker).
  - vitd 13y ago
    I guess it depends on your definition of "newsletters that users subscribed to." I have never voluntarily allowed a company to add me to their mailing lists for any reason. I always carefully check or uncheck the appropriate checkboxes so that I don't get added to mailing lists. Yet I've ended up on literally hundreds of mailing lists over the years. Luckily, for these types of cases, where I bought something from a legit company, they honor their unsubscribes. But really, why was I subscribed without my consent in the first place? What's worse is some places will re-add you to their lists every time you buy from them again. (I'm looking at you Moviefone.com!) I already unsubscribed. Why the @$#% are you re-subscribing me? It's not effective at all. It makes me never want to use your service again, which is what I've done with Moviefone.
egh 13y ago
Yup. If google can clear you promotions tab out of stuff you don't care about, it makes the ads they place there more valuable. Many people, it seems, haven't noticed that google is now placing ads in your "promotions" tab that look just like email: http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/07/theres-easy-way-escape-gmails-terrible-new-email-ads/67445/ http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/07/theres-easy-way-es...
bdcravens 13y ago
Not everything is direct. If Google makes a higher quality email product, they get more eyeballs for their ads.
jfoster 13y ago
Disconnecting businesses from their users seems like it might be part of Facebook's & Google's strategy. Promotional tab in Gmail, feed curation in Facebook, personalised search (thinning organic traffic), etc. What better way to boost the performance of an advertising business? It's also usually welcomed by consumers. Quite clever, really.

stefan_kendall 13y ago

Awesome. I've been fighting to unsubscribe from things for 3 years. From catchall filters that insta-delete to battling inscrutable unsubscribe pages, I'm pretty close to no spam. I wish I could unsubscribe from everything at once.

tgb 13y ago
Maybe they'll allow you to search for emails that have the unsubscribe button in your archive/spam/trash and then mass unsubscribe from them.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

resoluteteeth 13y ago
The article specifically says that the point of this is to fix the problem where people resort to marking messages as spam and thereby confusing Google's spam filter.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Thanks. For some reason I read this completely the opposite of how it was written. Doh! In the interest of not looking more like a moron than I already do, I've deleted my original.

acangiano 13y ago

This, contrary to what people might believe, is good for online marketing and for business. Here is why: * You're much better off with a list of people who actually care about your communication and your product, rather than a list of people sort of interested or downright annoyed by you, which haven't unsubscribed because they couldn't find the link. * Less disinterested subscribers means less costs to send and maintain the list (e.g., via Mailchimp or SES). * Less spam reports which hurt your email deliverability (get enough of those and you'll be booted off sites like Mailchimp). * People will have less unwanted commercial communication overall, and will be able to focus on yours (of course I'm talking about the selected group of people who are actually interested). I welcome this change, and I say this as someone who runs a site that sends 50,000+ 'newsletter' emails per week. This to me is good news.

tomerico 13y ago
If this is good for them, than why no marketing email feature a prominent unsubscribe button at the top of the email? Surely it's not an original idea by Google.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  Greed, mostly. And stupid short-term thinking of the "I don't care if it benefits everyone else, it doesn't benefit me now" type.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  If you use something like MailChimp (I think that's what many new businesses tend to use? I can't remember..) or one with pretty subscribe/unsubscribe page for every customer who uses the mailing list service, then the customer's customers will have the luck to enjoy opt-in/opt-out option. If your organization is still running some out-of-date, custom subscription software, then unsubscribe might be out of the question.
- lotyrin 13y ago
  Turns out most people are dumb and self-absorbed.
13y ago

SmileyKeith 13y ago

I was in some A/B test of this a while back and it's awesome. Can't wait for it to be rolled out.

k3oni 13y ago

This is a good feature but the issue is that even if you unsubscribe from a mailing list some will not actually unsubscribe you. Also i found out a while back that after unsubscribing from some lists i started getting a lot of spam from all kinds of lists to which i never subscribed before which let me to believe that some mailing lists will actually release/sell their unsubscribed lists to others. Btw this was tested on brand new email accounts with only one mailing list subscribed at the time.

colkassad 13y ago

This will be nice for my common-name gmail account: <first initial>.<lastname>@gmail.com. It's fairly unusable right now because of all the newsletters Bob, Bill, Brandy, Briana, Brian, etc sign me up to.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
+1. I wish double-opt-in were written into federal law. I'm so sick of John's, Jack's, Julian's, and Justin's newsletters :-/
- sjwright 13y ago
  +1. I have a personal email address of the form <first initial><second initial><lastname>@gmail.com and I get tonnes of misdirected mail from Sarahs, Samanthas, Sams and Sebastians. And that's with a second initial! I'm very close to moving my personal email to a vanity domain, for this reason alone. (It's also a bit smelly to rely on another company for your unique identifier.)
sjwright 13y ago
https://xkcd.com/1279/ https://xkcd.com/1279/

spindritf 13y ago

They also added a "confirm subscription" button for double opt-in lists that you can use straight from your inbox without viewing the particular message. Or maybe just tested adding it. Damn, I should've used it. I though it was neat.

ck2 13y ago

Now give me a filter has unsubscribe link > mark as spam

matthuggins 13y ago
Just because you can unsubscribe from something doesn't mean it's spam. Your statement just means that you don't know what "spam" actually means.
- wl 13y ago
  I do not subscribe to newsletters. Period. If an email sent to me has an unsubscribe link, it is most certainly spam.
k3oni 13y ago
The issue is with the ones that don't have a unsubscribe link and ask you to send them a fax or mail them to be unsubscribed.
- sparkie 13y ago
  I think it's implying that services which you intentionally (or accidentally) subscribed to usually have a setting when you log into their service in which you can enable/disable their marketing emails. Conversely, emails you get in which you can only subscribe through a link in the email or elsewhere is almost always some shit you never signed up to, thus, spam.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
I'd love that one too. It's tiring to have to do it manually all the time.
MitziMoto 13y ago
Jesus, this would be awful. Not every email with an unsubscribe link is spam, not even close. Every time you hit that spam button you put the sender's business in jeopardy. As someone who relies on email to make their business work, I provide multiple unsubscribe links in all my emails, please use them!

opinali 13y ago

Here's my personal algorithm for handling commercial email that appears in my inbox: 1. If I'm highly confident it's spam, mark it as spam. (Very rare necessity singe gmail catches spam pretty well). 2. Otherwise it's something I have subscribed for, perhaps without noticing (opt-in by default from some service I have used). Look for the Unsubscribe link, click it. 2.1. If the Unsubscribe link IMMEDIATELY unsubscribes me (landing in a page that just confirms I'm already unsubscribed), ok, then just delete the email. 2.2. But if ANY additional interaction is required--choosing a reason for unsubscription, having to click another button--after finishing this, I will also punish the sender by going back to gmail and mark the email as spam.

timdorr 13y ago
Why is the mailer asking you why you're unsubscribing a punishable offense? Mailchimp does this by default on any of their unsubscribe pages (which come after you've been unsubscribed).
- Drakim 13y ago
  If a service puts me on a subscription list without asking me, and then at the unsubscription page throws a questionnaire at me as to why I am unsubscribing, I take that as dishonest behavior. Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place! Depending on how completely unrelated the subscription is to whatever I signed up for (say I signed up for online image hosting, and they start sending me emails about their fantastic paid backup service) then I mark it as spam even if the unsubscribe button is easy and single-click.
  - xux 13y ago
    >Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place! You never become uninterested in something after you subscribe?
    - Drakim 13y ago
      Sure, that's another case entirely, and I wouldn't mark that as spam. I was referring only to the cases where you sign up for X and you get newsletters and whatnot that's not really related to your use of X.

Thiz 13y ago

I don't want to 'unsubscribe' telling spammers my email is valid for resell. I want to BLOCK spammers when I mark them as spammers, no matter if it is baby jesus reincarnated or if I personally subscribed to that list at the beginning unsuspecting an abusive spammer behind that mailing list. I mark dozens of mails as spam everyday and I keep getting them back by the same sender. Block means block, not unsubscribe.

danieldk 13y ago
The most frequent 'spam' mail that slips through the filter are conference mails (really). I have been to conferences in computational linguistics and machine learning. It is clear that some conferences are giving or selling e-mail addresses to other conferences. I don't really mind getting e-mails from related conferences, it seems that over time there has been much topic drift as my e-mail address has been handed from conference organiser to conference organiser. Unfortunately, since the conferences are all organised by separate entities, it is not possible to unsubscribe anymore. And unfortunately, this was before I started using '+' extensions to create custom addresses.
- mpclark 13y ago
  From my experience working with the commercial (for-profit) conference sector, I've never seen any organiser hand over a list of email addies to anyone. They are jealously guarded as a core asset of the business. They do quite often (heck, all the time, in fact) do "swaps", where they will mail another org's piece to their own list in return for the same. These emails will usually seek to get you to give up your contact details in return for something (a whitepaper, an interview transcript, even the conference brochure), thus adding you to the new org's list as well. But the key point is you should always be able to unsubscribe from the first org and hear no more from them or their "marketing partners". I think most would see it as unprofessional, bad business and cavalier with regard to privacy to actually give lists of email addresses to other organisations. Of course, there are also some very big conference organisers out there, and they may well be pushing all sorts of unrelated events through their in-house lists. Once again, a simple unsubscribe should do the trick.

typicalbender 13y ago

A long time ago I created a filter that takes any message with the words "unsubscribe" and put it into a folder with the intention of writing something to go through and auto-click unsubscribe at some point.

darkstalker 13y ago

If find it silly that someone can defend spam as a legitimate "business". Spam is always undesired and must die. In general all advertising over email is just noise.

blumkvist 13y ago
>In general all advertising over email is just noise. care to back up your opinion with some facts? Because in my opinion majority of b2b advertising is driven by email.
adzicg 13y ago
lists aren't always advertising. I had a list for people who read my books and want to get early previews of new material - kind of insiders view into new thinking, more an irregular newsletter than any form of advertising. every single person manually subscribed to the list, there was never any spam, but e-mail open rates on the list have been dropping over the last few years to the point that I stopped sending it out last year. Of course, content might be at fault, but the engagement among the group that opened the e-mail was still good, so I guess this was collateral damage of the general trend in fighting circular e-mail. I read an article in HBR a few months ago that people mostly now get notifications on mobile devices, so the logical step for promotional marketing (soft spam) would I guess be to move to mobile apps. the stuff that I was sending out wasn't really suited for that, but if I started the whole thing again I'd probably do it with a mobile app.

bennesvig 13y ago

Ironic that Google+ marketing emails don't have a prominent unsubscribe button or even a one click unsubscribe option.

dudus 13y ago
transactional emails are not marketing emails.

lukejduncan 13y ago

THANK YOU Gmail! I tend to do quarterly purges of the periodic emails I find myself subscribed to. This is fantastic.

losvedir 13y ago

So how does this work exactly? I'd assume it just looks for a link in the email that says "Unsubscribe" and just makes that same link more prominent, but does anyone know for sure? I wonder how it identifies the link? CAN-SPAM doesn't require the link be called "Unsubscribe" - it could be "Stop Receiving Emails From Us" or something like that. Hopefully it will avoid false positives like a patio11-type informative email with a link to an article on "Limiting the Unsubscribes" or something. I ask because it seems like a useful feature and I just want to make sure that my site takes advantage of it.

deleted 13y ago
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mattbarrie 13y ago

pot, kettle black how do I unsubscribe to google ads

richbradshaw 13y ago
http://www.google.com/settings/ads http://www.google.com/settings/ads, click Opt Out, or http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

donbronson 13y ago

Outlook.com has been doing this for a while. Seems that GOOG took a cue from MSFT, no?

lutusp 13y ago

I'm shocked that people who regard themselves as technically sophisticated haven't figured out what clicking on an unsubscribe link actually does. 1. In principle and according to Can-Spam, all marketing e-mails should have an unsubscribe link. 2. But clicking on the link doesn't do what you think it does. 3. After you've clicked on advertiser A's link, he can't mail you again (not that some don't cheat and mail again anyway). 4. BUT -- Advertiser A can legally pass his "unsubscribe" list to advertiser B, or make it part of a widely distributed list for use by other advertisers, LEGALLY. Oh -- did I forget to mention that this is legal? Before Can-Spam, the standard advice was never to reply to a spam e-mail. But for some reason, after Can-Spam, people got the idea that it was their civic duty to click "unsubscribe" links, even though this identifies your e-mail address as read by a human, and thereby makes it a hot property in the spam business. Why don't people understand that Can-Spam just made things worse, and that otherwise nothing has changed?

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Why don't people understand that Can-Spam just made things worse, CAN SPAM was an unusually honestly named federal law to preempt the restrictive anti-spam measures states were adopting and ensuring that marketers subject to US law can spam consumers. This was widely observed at the time the measure was being considered.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > This was widely observed at the time the measure was being considered. Indeed it was, even by politicians informed on the issues, but to no effect at all.
Flenser 13y ago
While I accept that this may be happening with more disreputable companies it hasn't been my experience. I use unique email addresses for everything I subscribe to or purchase. I've unsubscribed from several marketing mailing lists that I ended up on. The only spam I've received to any of these addresses has been due to data breaches. What companies do you know of that are doing this?

dublinben 13y ago

Is anyone else getting a completely broken SSL/TLS certificate from this site?

hendry 13y ago

Surprised no one has mentioned http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt I hope this means Gmail will now support List-Unsubscribe in their UI. Last time I checked they didn't with my own old email marketer: https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list/maillist https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list...