5 ms·

And then filtering is often your only option because the unsubscribe link doesn't work right with the plus character in it. Also, Gmail helpfully prevents us fr

by wl 12y ago

And then filtering is often your only option because the unsubscribe link doesn't work right with the plus character in it. Also, Gmail helpfully prevents us from creating filters that pipe the messages in question to /dev/null.

davenaff 12y ago
In gmail you can setup a filter that automatically deletes messages. Not quite /dev/null but pretty close.
- wl 12y ago
  "Delete it" merely moves the messages to the trash. It does not, in fact, delete the message. Not close at all.
  - davenaff 12y ago
    And anything in the trash gets automatically deleted in 30 days.
kazinator 12y ago
That kind of depends entirely on who/what you are unsubscribing from, and how intelligently they encode e-mail addresses through URL's, surely? Maybe the problem you're running into is that the + character is special in URL's and must be escaped, otherwise it is treated as the representation of a space character. E.g. the URL parameter in <http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob+whatever@domain> http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob+whatever@domain> looks, after URL decoding by the server, like "bob whatever@domain". The software which inserted the e-mail into the URL didn't treat the plus properly, but the software which is decoding the URL is treating it like it is supposed to. If that's the issue, the workaround could be as simple as manually fixing the URL in your browser, replacing the unescaped + character with its percent-encoding equivalent, %2B, as in <http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob%2Bwhatever@domain> http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob%2Bwhatever@domain>. The URL parameter bob%2Bwhatever@domain should now decode into bob+whatever@domain. Try it next time. It's easy to see how this could happen because the insertion of e-mail addresses into unsubscribe links in e-mail bodies is done by ad-hoc software probably cobbed together in house, whereas whereas URL parsing is done by generic URL handling code in a web server. (But anyway, the whole point of this exercise is that we don't trust the unsubscribing. If unsubscribing could be trusted to be honored, we wouldn't need this extraneous e-mail address that we can recognize and junk.)

by wl 12y ago

davenaff 12y ago

In gmail you can setup a filter that automatically deletes messages. Not quite /dev/null but pretty close.

wl 12y ago
"Delete it" merely moves the messages to the trash. It does not, in fact, delete the message. Not close at all.
- davenaff 12y ago
  And anything in the trash gets automatically deleted in 30 days.

kazinator 12y ago

That kind of depends entirely on who/what you are unsubscribing from, and how intelligently they encode e-mail addresses through URL's, surely? Maybe the problem you're running into is that the + character is special in URL's and must be escaped, otherwise it is treated as the representation of a space character. E.g. the URL parameter in <http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob+whatever@domain> http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob+whatever@domain> looks, after URL decoding by the server, like "bob whatever@domain". The software which inserted the e-mail into the URL didn't treat the plus properly, but the software which is decoding the URL is treating it like it is supposed to. If that's the issue, the workaround could be as simple as manually fixing the URL in your browser, replacing the unescaped + character with its percent-encoding equivalent, %2B, as in <http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob%2Bwhatever@domain> http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob%2Bwhatever@domain>. The URL parameter bob%2Bwhatever@domain should now decode into bob+whatever@domain. Try it next time. It's easy to see how this could happen because the insertion of e-mail addresses into unsubscribe links in e-mail bodies is done by ad-hoc software probably cobbed together in house, whereas whereas URL parsing is done by generic URL handling code in a web server. (But anyway, the whole point of this exercise is that we don't trust the unsubscribing. If unsubscribing could be trusted to be honored, we wouldn't need this extraneous e-mail address that we can recognize and junk.)