This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help: 1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of acci

This is a difficult balancing act, to be sure. I firmly believe two things would help: 1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons. 2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to. For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.