
Gmail auto-unsubscribe simplifies your life - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/software/72216/gmail-auto-unsubscribe-simplifies-your-life
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mattmaroon
They should let you unsubscribe without reporting as spam. As far as I'm
concerned, anyone whose mailing list I ended up on as a result of a purchase
and who lets me end it with one click shouldn't have their email delivery
system damaged by spam reports. Those should be left for the non-opt-in and
non-unsubscribable lists.

~~~
mustpax
Think about it this way: when you attempt to unsubscribe, you are in effect
telling the mass marketer that this is a live email address. As in, there's an
actual human being reading these emails.

Such live email addresses are very valuable to spammers. So this feature is
susceptible to abuse by spammers providing the unsubscribe functionality, but
only prioritizing the attempted unsubscribers higher in their mailing lists.

So built into their unsubscribe attempt, there needs to be a way to very
strictly penalize those who pretend to allow unsubscribes while ignoring them
to harvest more email addresses. Hence, they call it "unsubscribe and mark as
spam" because any other email messages you receive from that sender will be
marked as spam with extreme prejudice.

~~~
dcurtis
This makes sense if all _future_ emails from the sender are marked as spam,
but the email I am using to unsubscribe should _not_ be marked as spam.

The button should be "unsubscribe and mark all future emails as spam."

~~~
alextp
I usually use "mark as spam" as a "never show me anything like this again,
please" button, so I do not really care if the message is really a spam.

What bugs me is that some legit mailing lists are prone to receiving spam once
in a while.

~~~
frossie
I can't bring myself to do that. In my brain "mark as spam" is synonymous to
"Mummy! Make the Bad Man go away!". I have trouble overloading this with "Gee
I guess I'm just not that into you".

~~~
alextp
Well, I grew into "Mark as spam" before I got any spam,back when I my email
was from a small local ISP and I didn't send many public emails. I taught
mozilla's spam filter to recognize the forwarded emails my father sent me (and
keep the emails he wrote himself), which were generally junk powerpoint
presentations, so for me it's always been a way of saying "gee, I'm just not
that into you" (which is also why I think I'd like a bayesian filter to learn
my categorizations of messages into labels).

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ZeroGravitas
They should just offer this directly. You shouldn't have to first declare it
"spam" (which I would feel bad about if it was something I'd signed up for),
nor should I have to scrabble about in the small print for a link that might
then expect me to log in with a password.

Maybe Google could push for a standard unsubscribe mechanism with the driver
being that you're more likely to get falsely accused of being spam if you
don't offer people an easy way out.

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Erwin
This depends on the List-Unsubscribe header: <http://www.list-
unsubscribe.com/>

which can be set to an email address or link. If you're adding remove links to
your outgoing emails, you might as well put it in the header as well.
Hotmail/live mail will only show the link for trusted emails IIRC.

As Gmail has no "feedback loop" that sends spam reports back to the sender,
this is better for me (as an email sender) than nothing. People regularly
report email as spam that they signed up for and that they just don't care to
receive anymore (they even report transactional email as spam, such as an
ordery summary/order shipped email).

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jlees
As a total aside, something I didn't know about until far too recently:
hitting 'm' in a Gmail conversation thread mutes it, meaning replies are
automatically archived. It doesn't always seem to work, but I find it awfully
useful.

~~~
smokinn
Really!? I wonder how often I've done this by accident and never knew figuring
the conversation ended.

~~~
snprbob86
It only works if you enable keyboard shortcuts. It also shows a yellow alert
banner along the top of the screen and provides an "Undo" link.

~~~
smokinn
I probably would've noticed the banner then, thanks.

I love the keyboard shortcuts, just never heard about this one.

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a2tech
This is an excellent little feature.

I do wonder though, that if you send the unsubscribe request via this feature
if Google lowers the weight of your spam report. As someone that runs a few
mailing lists I know that many users will click the 'spam' button in their
email client instead of sending an unsubsribe request. They don't realize it,
but if enough people do that on gmail, yahoo or hotmail the mailing list is
marked as spam and its almost impossible to get unmarked as spam.

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zacharypinter
I wonder if this will lead to unsubscribe links containing captchas. Oh the
irony...

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dpcan
How can we get an auto-activate script for emails that arrive that require
clicking a link to activate a new account somewhere?

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geuis
I don't get this option in Gmail.

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geuis
I don't get this option in Gmail.

