
Gmail adding prominent 'Unsubscribe' option to marketing emails - r0h1n
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2100020/gmails-unsubscribe-tool-comes-out-of-the-weeds.html
======
acangiano
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
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.

~~~
yeukhon
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organization is still running some out-of-date, custom subscription software,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.

------
danieldk
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.

~~~
err4nt
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
"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.

~~~
phillmv
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.

~~~
DannyBee
"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."

This is the part i don't get. Let's ignore this specific case for a second (so
this is more of a lament, than a direct response to your argument about this
specific case): In general, believing _everything_ is tied to ads shows a
distinct lack of imagination on the part of HN people, who by and large i've
found to be pretty imaginative. For example, Google has been working on
diversification for years, among other things, so why would one assume
_everything_ is tied to ads?

To be frank: Does everyone really believe Larry and the executive team are
that dumb? That they can't come up with any business strategies that don't
involve ads?

~~~
phillmv
>For example, Google has been working on diversification for years, among
other things, so why would one assume everything is tied to ads?

OK, well, broadly speaking, Google like all organizations wants to grow. The
best source of growth is increasing revenue stream. Advertising, in turn, was
96% of their revenue in ~2012^1.

They're going to try to find other revenue streams. But advertising is clearly
not going anywhere.

We're still figuring out how advertising is going to keep working. And
honestly, advertising is huge money and is what is driving the fierce battle
over mobile at the moment. Here we have what is possibly the last great
expansion of fresh eyeballs, and it is crucial for the existing companies to
figure out how to serve them ads. Hence Android and the WhatsApp purchase.

So. If you have a feature that in any way can improve upon 96% of their
business, that glove will probably fit.

I mean, I doubt Google Cars is seriously so they can show commuters more ads.
They have a deep capacity for machine learning, and they bought Boston
Dynamics; I'm sure we'll see lots more Google automation in the coming years.

[1]: [http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/29/google-
advertising/](http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/29/google-advertising/)

------
opinali
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
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
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
>Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place!

You never become uninterested in something after you subscribe?

~~~
Drakim
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
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.

~~~
mpclark
Not to stand up for spammers, but this initiative looks like it is designed to
work with "the good guys"; organisations that use services like Mailchimp and
have unsubscribe mechanisms that work and so on.

It won't really help with people who just send stuff over and over to a home-
made list that is kept in an Excel spreadsheet and never clean the
undeliverables or unsubscribes out of it.

And it certainly wont help with the pills and stocks brigade.

~~~
pjscott
If enough users press "unsubscribe" to a sender, and that sender doesn't stop
sending them emails, this is a high quality signal that the sender needs to be
blocked altogether.

If GMail's response to this kind of signal is aggressive enough, it also gives
an incentive for legitimate-ish senders to offer one-click unsubscribe links,
to decrease the number of cases where someone presses 'unsubscribe' but then
doesn't jump through some second hoop.

So yeah, I'd say this has some advantages for dealing with a wide range of
scum.

------
spindritf
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.

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

~~~
dudus
transactional emails are not marketing emails.

------
colkassad
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
+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
+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.)

------
lutusp
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
> 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
> 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.

------
losvedir
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.

------
k3oni
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.

------
ck2
Now give me a filter

    
    
        has unsubscribe link > mark as spam

~~~
matthuggins
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
I do not subscribe to newsletters. Period. If an email sent to me has an
unsubscribe link, it is most certainly spam.

------
hendry
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...](https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-
hackandtell/blob/master/list/maillist)

------
darkstalker
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.

~~~
adzicg
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.

------
lukejduncan
THANK YOU Gmail!

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

------
typicalbender
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.

------
SmileyKeith
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.

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

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

------
mattbarrie
pot, kettle black

how do I unsubscribe to google ads

~~~
richbradshaw
[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)

------
stefan_kendall
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
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.

