I created a similar service earlier this year which runs on exactly the same idea (forwarding emails to unsubscribe to them). It's nice to see some validation for the idea on HN.
I've attacked the problem from a different angle though - I've tried to automate the service a lot more. Automatically looking for the unsubscribe button and filling out any HTML forms that appear etc. It doesn't always work but it's been fun trying to work out ways to automate the different steps etc.
If anyone is interested in a similar product with a slightly different way of doing things, different pricing and a web UI, please check out:
https://www.stopthat.email/
Hopefully you don't mind the health competition ryanmjacobs.
It's not necessarily worse either -- if they're actively monitoring failures, updating their process and re-running the failed unsubscribes. It should be much easier to scale... especially if they move beyond using html forms and just hit the endpoints that the forms are hitting.
While I do see the value of such a service, I wouldn't trust anyone with unsubscribe links I receive.
I have seen companies generating an API key for the unsubscribe button, where the key can be used to perform other actions and lead to account takeover
Btw, how specific is the American CAN-SPAM act in terms of how the unsubscribe link should work? In my country I sometimes get emails with unsubscribe links that require you to log in first, which can be a pain to pull out the credentials when you don't really remember signing up for it in the first place. Does CAN-SPAM specify, say, that an unsubscribe link 1)must not require a login? 2)must lead to completion of the subscribe process within x steps?
§ 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out.
Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page, in order to:
(a) Use a return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3), to submit a request not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from a sender;
Interesting. That means that Twitter's implementation is one that is against the law, as it required me to log in before I could unsubscribe. It also only unsubscribed me from "that type of email", so lo and behold, more spam arrived a few days later.
The clause only applies to certain email. Applicable? "The term “commercial electronic mail message” means any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service". Probably not.
§ 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out.
Tell that to eBay. I cannot got them to leave me alone.
There is no unsubscribe link. Only “To change which emails you receive from eBay, go to Communication Preferences in My eBay.” But there is no such option in My eBay.
There is a “Communications Preferences” elsewhere, but there’s nothing in there to stop eBay spam. I have everything set to off, but they still keep coming.
I think he's talking about signing into a preexisting account. It maybe be illegal to require you to sign up, but I don't think it's proven that requiring preexisting customers to sign in to a preexisting account to adjust their communication settings.
Personally I'm all for requiring an automation enabled unsubscribe header and double opt in (requiring a response from a subscription confirmation email to subscribe in the first place).
The wording is very clear, you can NOT require login to change subscription settings. A password would classify as additional information outside of email address and preferences. Otherwise someone could sign up with your email and you would have no recourse to end the spam, or the company could just bulk create accounts for you without any way to log in (i.e. Facebook).
> The wording is very clear, you can NOT require login to change subscription settings.
You’re right that wording is clear, though you might have misunderstood or skipped over the scope of this CFR, which is “Non-solicited” messages (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/316.1), and excludes transactional email (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/316.3). Since the parent was explicitly talking about any email communication coming from accounts you’ve signed up for, it is important to note that the CFR you’re citing does not always apply.
You absolutely can legally require a password to change some subscription and communication settings relating directly to someone’s account, to require otherwise would be a glaring and massive security hole. It’s quite easy to spoof email addresses, and being able to unsubscribe someone else from transactional email subscriptions would be extremely dangerous.
I recently opted out of one where they gave me a list of opt-out choices, with the default being "I still wish to receive this information". If I was on autopilot I would have submitted it. It seems to follow the letter of the law but feels pretty sleazy.
If you did log in, whether you remember your credentials or not, a company can send you transactional emails, marketing emails, or both. CAN-SPAM does not cover emails that are “primarily” transactional, even if the email is part marketing. Companies are legally allowed to require authentication for updating the subscription settings of transactional email. And you wouldn’t want it any other way, otherwise someone could easily spoof you and unsubscribe you from notifications from your bank about your bank account, or other important email you depend on.
On top of that, rather often other people sign up for accounts using my email address, which is my first name + my last name at gmail. I'm guessing they missed a number or middle initial. I could password reset their account, but that seems legally/morally dubious.
Fortunately nobody's signed up for an account for anything I'd actually care to sign up for myself. It's usually some grocery store in Malaysia or something.
My e-mail address is on a 3rd party list that is sold repeatedly to marketers. The marketers do not employ unsubscribe links or provide a means to get off of their list in the e-mail. I'd rather not engage them and ask their source.
Is there a way to learn who the original list holder is and get my address off?
This is illegal in the US under the CAN-SPAM act, with severe penalties. No legitimate company will send marketing emails without an opt-out.
If you don’t want to engage them, you should mark the email as junk. This flags the email in their email provider. If their rate of junk email increases too high, they lose their ability to send email through that provider.
Afaik, there is no automated information flow to the provider.
It kind of works, but differently than you said.
Let's say, you flag a mail on GMail as spam.
GMail's filters will learn: both the spam filter for your inbox as well as a shared filter. If the shared filter learned that all mails from that provider are junk, then gmail may not accept any more mails from that provider.
But the provider is interested in his ability to send mails to gmail customers - because his own customers demand it.
So, a good provider would just kick out that rouge customer who sends junk.
And that's where the fun begins: A big provider can deliver spam, if it's only a small percentage of his usual volume (too big to fail). And not every provider is cooperative.
And the process is slow - some filter has to be fed a large amount of junk, so it finally rejects a large portion of of the valid mail.
A better way is: Get your provider to send an abuse mail to the origin. In my experience, it's still a fight against windmills, but every bit helps.
Google (and others) have a spam feedback system [1], so if the sending system has implimented that, and has enough volume and reputation on the receiving system, spam reports will flow upstream and usually result in automatic unsubscribe or blocking or account flagging depending on the circumstances.
GMail's filters will learn: both the spam filter for your inbox as well as a shared filter
Considering how many dozens of times I’ve marked messages from Soma as spam in Gmail, yet they still keep coming, I have zero faith in Gmail’s learning ability. Either that or Soma can pay Google to bypass the spam filter. Other email providers will.
Your pricing model does seem to need some work. Credits would likely be a better match than a monthly service. It would better fit the nature of the problem. But, kudos on offering a manual service in a space where automation can easily fail.
Wow. Your comment is 2 hours old and it seems the model is already changed.
Kudos to the author.
> Note: After some input, I have decided to change billing to a credit-based system. Each unsubscribe uses 1 Credit. Over time, you should need this service less and less :)
Edit: Or go through each result, some email clients will highlight the search term "unsubscribe" after search, making the unsubscribe link easier to find.
Ha, interesting approach :) I like the idea, but I wonder if it might trash too many non-spam emails for me. Have you had any problems with false-positives?
In all seriousness, here’s what I do to combat Insidious Mailing List Spam. It’s kinda simple.
1. Get one email address for friends and family. Never ever post it online. Never use it for any shopping or anything. This is your email address. There is no mailbox anxiety because you get one email a day to this address and it’s from your dad and you love him.
2. Get another one for mailing lists. Crucially, using a rule, mark every new mail as read on receipt. There is no mailbox anxiety because the “read me” or “keep me unread until I’ve actioned” or whatever is gone. Totally gone. Need to do a thing with an email? Figure out a way outside your inbox to track that.
I started this accidentally about a year ago and it’s a revelation.
I have been doing this for well over 10 years and can confirm the approach, with one small tweaks:
The address for friends and family should be split in 2 - one for the really technologically literate ones, who will never do stupid crap with it like using it in a pinterest "Share this!" form, and one for everyone else (who must never learn you didn't give them "best" address because they're clueless).
Also, if you own a few domains, devote a whole cheap one to mailing lists, online subscription and whatever else. Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service (like mybank@myjunkmaildomain.icu, amazon@myjunkmaildomain.icu, facebook@myjunkmaildomain.icu, somedodgyonlinemerchant@myjunkmaildomain.icu etc).
This gives you the benefit of seeing who leaked your address when you see spam, of being able to disable them individually, of being able to migrate provider with no impact to your accounts (just repoint your own domain's email forwardings)
> Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service
I tried this and don’t recommend it.
Yeah, you get the advantage of knowing who leaked your address. But I don’t care. If the ‘spam and lists’ address gets too spammy, I’ll just create another.
The disadvantage is that you have to configure a mail client to send from this address if you ever want to do that, and I found myself doing it far more often than I imagined. Need to write back to a store regarding a transaction? Frequently enough. To my health insurance company for some reason? Of course.
No, the idea is to remove as much friction as possible. This adds friction. Keep it simple.
There are services designed to allow you to think up new email addresses on the fly, with no setup, and still have them delivered. I personally like https://www.spamgourmet.com/ - you can create an identifying address on the fly that also limits the total number of emails you'll receive from that address. It solves all the issues you mentioned - it's frictionless and still allows replies, while preventing spam. The gmail '+' feature works too, but is so high profile that a lot of spammers know how to parse it.
You can also use the + for email adress, my.name+facebook@domain.com. No need to register another mail adress for each service. It can lead to problems logging in though, not everyone knows that + is a legal character in mail adresses.
Panix.com has a feature that sidesteps that problem. It accepts any email address that looks like: hackernews@myname.users.panix.com, where you can customize "hackernews" to be a mailing list, company, or any text; and "myname" is your actual email address, eg myname@panix.com. No charge. Works great. Easily filtered.
I had enough validation and dictation issues with that approach that I registered a catchall email on a subdomain, so I give out yoursitename@email.example.com. For one thing, anyone wise to that trick will just strip
This kind of works. But also realize that if your email makes it into their contacts, then phone apps will harvest this. Things like WhatsApp or LinkedIn will definitely harvest these so it’s not nearly as secure as you believe. You could have double indirection where you create a secret email and give everyone a second secret email and forward all emails from there.
I just set up a wildcard email forwarder on my domain and set up an email address for every domain or website I sign up for (e.g. ycombinator.com@mydomain.net). Keeps everything nicely separated, logins are predictable, and I can track who got my email from where.
It makes certain things more complicated, like authenticating against certain services, or if someone sends and invitation to one of your domain emails, but it works just fine 95% of the time.
I used to have this problem with Gmail because it was easy to receive mail at a new address, but always a 10-minute process to start sending mail from a new address.
I just switched to Fastmail and was pleasantly surprised with their solution. You can set up wildcard response aliases so that if you receive an email to random.onetime@mydomain.net, when you hit reply, it automatically sends from the random.onetime@mydomain.net.
I have never once in my life "signed up" to a mailing list. The only reason I can think of that I receive so much spam is from sites where I've used my email address selling that information to others, or otherwise leaking it.
I have my own domain with [anything]@mydomain.tld gets forward to my real address, so I generally use a unique email address for any service, retailer, mailing list etc. A password manager is a real benefit for this.
I've caught places that get hacked or sold their list and can filter them readily.
I think that this approach also helps reduce the attack surface from a hack as there is little to no reuse of credentials, but at N=1 I can't verify that. Maybe there's an oversight in my approach.
The 'privacy' section is a bit too vague. Sure, you aren't selling my data, but what are you doing with it? What happens to the emails you receive - are they archived or stored, or do you delete them? How secure are they kept?
These messages could have lots of private data in them, even simple things like usernames might be of value to hackers.
That's a fair point. I added an update to the Privacy section. I really don't care about these spam emails, plus Gsuite only offers 30 GB for the plan I purchased. After processing, the emails will be sent to Gmail's trash, which is cleared every 30 days.
This reminds me of an article maybe ten years back on how to a static email can change its appearance when it’s forwarded so as to hide the unsubscribe button so forwardees can’t unsubscribe (accidentally or otherwise) the forwarder. As I recall, there were a few different solutions that were each specific to the mail client doing the forwarding (using css that matches the DOM structure of the forwarded content).
I think it’s still an open question because federal regulations still require either a one-click unsubscribe or at most an unsubscribe link leading directly to a form with at most a single required input being the email address to unsubscribe, i.e. no chance to verify the clicker.
I vaguely remember this article but I don’t think it’s the one, as I distinctly recall mention of MS Outlook and how it wraps quotes (which means it’s maybe older than this article). It was also longer and more technical.
Among the post, this article[0] is referenced, which does mention testing on outlook and is more technical! It might be it.
> It turns out that all email services take your original message and conveniently wrap it in a div (with a class) or a blockquote, meaning you can use that as a CSS selector. It's so stupidly simple.
I wonder how the situation evolved from a decade ago. Time to do a bit of research!
What about shady services that won't unsubscribe your email even if you do it from their admin panel or just outright doesn't work? What about services that provide a really complicated unsubscribtion procedure, e.g. enter password, fill multi-page quiz why you are leaving, wait up to 24h for some code that you will have no idea where to enter. And finally, I suspect there are just plain evil "services" that after unsubscribing will put up your email on various spam lists - have fun with even more spam.
Good behaving email marketing services are not the problem, I would gladly pay for a service that deals with those shady ones and maybe even helps to battle spambots on a global scale, by reporting spam to appropriate authorities and even using GDPR laws to stop them. Tried using spamcop once, but most reports end up "nulled" and not actually reported.
I've gotten into the habit of spam labeling these emails, hoping they contribute to the great spam filter in the sky. This works much better than unsubscribing because most of these emails aren't even intended for me but the jerks who keep using my email address to sign up for services and aren't required to verify the email address they provided.
One thing I've realized having moved away from Gmail to fastmail, is the importance of owning your spam data as I had to train Fastmail's spam system.
If you didn’t subscribe, don’t unsubscribe. Set up a filter that auto-reports as spam. That way you don’t have to see it ever again, but you still give spam filters a fighting chance at stopping other people from seeing it too. The more you hurt their deliverability, the less effective spamming will become.
Fastmail allows unlimited aliases. Just use an alias on every shady website and not only can you just delete the alias when you’re done, but you’ll also know who sold away your email address in the first place.
Really? How would they even know? I've been clicking "report as spam" for anything with a not-immediately-obvious or intentionally complicated unsubscribe button (to punish shady tactics) for a very long time now and I haven't seen any signs of missing any order confirmations.
You mean it gets the spammer blacklisted so they risk being unable to contact me.
I've actually pinged a couple of services to let them know that spamming me is a security vulnerability, because they loose their ability to contact me.
Let's say you often buy on Amazon (or any other online shop), they send you a newsletter. If you mark it as spam instead of unsubscribing, you could be losing some of their emails you'd want to see (order confirmation, response to a message you sent them, etc).
I have simple solution for that.
If the newsletter doesn't stop and keeps coming, I would just cancel my email address amzn1@mydomain and open another one amzn2@mydomain.
If the spam persists, I just move business elsewhere. As simple as that.
Are you saying that a substantial number of people is routinely using your _fastmail_ address with services that send _marketing_ emails to _unverified_ email addresses?
I find this highly implausible.
Edit -
Why the downvotes? If I read the OP correctly, they have such a common address that random people mindlessly type it into various subscription nags. Can you think of a such @fastmail address?
If it's not that common, then their address was just leaked and ended up on the spammers list, so tagging as spam is a proper thing to do. However it sounds like the OP also spam-tags bulk emails they don't like even if they are subscribed to those, which is as ass thing to do. It hinders delivery to others, nicks the sender reputation, etc.
I get a lot of junk mail haha. It's like any time I purchase something from Walmart or Newegg, they subscribe me to like 5 mailing lists.
I wanted something where I could bulk select items in my inbox and have someone else deal with it.
I just made a product I wanted :) But yeah, it's not sustainable in the sense of money -- but in my eyes, if my product becomes less necessary over time, then I did my job right
Make it so that you can gift subscriptions. This is the kind of thing to give to a CEO friend as a gift. If they are actually chief of something, then it saves them time which is precious to them. If it is your friend and his one person marketing firm, makes a fun gift.
Depends.. many types of list maintainers are very bad abusers, political list, charity lists come to mind. You get unsubscribed from that "list" your email gets sold on to multiple lists, also a response or worse a purchase via the mail like this makes yours email higher value.
Anyone who attends a conference once or twice a year. Vendors sponsor those and in return often get access to the attendee list. Name, title, company, email, etc.
This is awesome and I have a question that is somewhat relevant. Is there a known way to take care of marketing/up-sell disguised as "service-related" emails from Xfinity or the GrubHub marketing emails that automatically re-subscribe you every time you order food?
I do not want to sound negative but my honest opinion is that you need to work on your price model. Very few people will be ready to pay $5-10 per month(!) for such small convenience. Assuming that you do mostly automatic processing your actual costs should be really small (per user). You can probably offer this service for $5/year and still make profit, while attracting more users.
The site says emails are manually processed and a comment here by the poster [1] states that they pay $15/hr for someone to do it.
I agree that the value isn't there for the pricing, especially as a monthly subscription. $5/month is too expensive considering most people won't even pay that to read content they actually want. All major email providers have spam/unsubscribe buttons already and I don't want to risk forwarding emails to someone else to reveal even more data.
If this was more like a global unsubscribe service that removed me from all major email lists somehow, or helped with other privacy/data cleanup then it might be worth a one-time fee.
I find it fitting that #1 on your Wall of Shame is Uber. I've lost count of how many times I've tried to unsubscribe from their marketing. Even marking it as spam in Gmail dosen't seem to help.
I'm not sure I understand. If I wasn't going to use my email, why would I care if it unsubscribed or not? What's the difference between this and just using a fake email?
One thing I would be worried about is that a lot of emails have auto login urls if you click a button. For example, if you get an email from Quora, you are auto logged into Quora from that link.
Depends on the implementation, at $WORK we have similar mechanism but the links clicked in the email do what's called a partial login that gives basic access to some closed pages but still needs authentication to access or change account details. We have this exactly because people forward emails and such.
I do the same with my custom domain with a catch all email-address that end up in one gmail inbox where I have setup specific filters and rules.
Everything I don't care about (ex: linkedin@mydomain) goes straight to trash.
A few things get marked as read and archived automatically (ex: pge@mydomain)
I honestly have never wanted to receive mail from anyone other than a real human being. There is not a single 'account update' or marketing mail, etc.. that I am happy to see, nor has there ever been.
Does anyone actually enjoy those mails? How is it any better than the classic physical letterbox spam that used to be more common?
The site says that the processor is the creator's high schooler sister. What's to stop someone from buying credits and sending the processor nsfw content?
Personally, I'd be really uncomfortable opening up a service like this with underage family members involved. Why not MTurk?
Just a thought: what about focusing on the really annoying emails? So that when someone who is not very techie can't figure out why they keep getting the damn emails, they forward them to you? Rather than as a general purpose service.
Also, implement as a gmail plugin if that's possible.
Another solution is to create a different email address for each website/newsletter. This can be done quite easily with services like SimpleLogin or 33mail. This solution also makes this harder to track you online, therefore protect your privacy.
The biggest problem I have is “legitimate” communications from companies I have nothing to do with.
My email is my hn@gmail so I get all kinds of random receipts, confirmations, etc m. Because these companies consider them valid communications with a customer it is impossible to unsubscribe
As someone who’s responsible for sending emails, all of the comments about “marking it as spam is easier than unsubscribing” really make me cringe.
For several reasons:
1. If you subscribe to a list then please please please take the time to locate the very clearly marked unsubscribe link, or use the one that gmail or your other email client shows. I spend a lot of time making sure it’s suuuper easy to unsubscribe.
2. Spammers know how to get around spam protections when they want to. They can switch domains and do other shady stuff a legit company can’t, so by marking my email as spam because it’s “easier” you’re not helping the fight against spam but rather hurting a legitimate email sender.
Now, if you can’t unsubscribe (because there’s no link, it’s broken, or simply doesn’t actually unsubscribe), and this is a legit company, please please please let them know.
If after all of this you still can’t unsubscribe, hit that spam button twice!
>>> please please please take the time to locate the very clearly marked unsubscribe link
You mean the one word link in font 6 hidden maybe somewhere at the bottom of the email if it's there at all?
I have never seen an easy clearly marked unsubscribe in my life.
When at look at my friends and parents who are not as computer savvy and often don't see things put in front of them, there is no way they would ever manage to unsubscribe from any newsletter. The spam button is a godsend.
What's worse is when the unsubscribe link takes you to a page where you can select the reason why you are unsubscribing, and it doesn't include an option like "I never signed up to this mailing list". I've never in my life checked the box to sign up to any mailing list, so this is always my reason, yet some arrogant marketers believe they always obtain consent when they add emails to their mailing lists and so remove this option.
> when the unsubscribe link takes you to a page where you can select the reason why you are unsubscribing
It should only take one click on the unsubscribe link in the email for the sender to actually do the unsubscribe. If after processing it the sender is determined to try and stuff a sales and marketing survey on the landing page, I suppose it's hard to stop them, but I won't play "20 questions" just to get the sender to accept that I don't want any more of their emails.
Executive summary: if I can't unsubscribe from your email newsletter with one click, you get the spam filter treatment <sigh>
The even worse scenario is when the unsubscribe workflow is hidden behind a login screen. Unsubscribing from a mailing list should be one of two clicks at most.
Spend 20 seconds on the page, couldn't see an unsubscribe button.
Tried to spend another 20 seconds in good faith, still couldn't find it. I honestly don't understand what is the strange layouts of these pages and where is the newsletter even supposed to be.
Spam that is.
P.S. If you're wondering, the news seems to be the left column, then go to the bottom. I don't think having to scroll through 3 screens of texts and pictures to find a button is easy. My not tech savvy parents and friends wouldn't be able to find it.
3. This is not an ad hominem, and I'm sure you're part of the 1%, but 99% of newsletters I receive are spam that I never wanted in the first place.
Companies employ a tremendous range of dark patterns to get my consent for email, then flood me with spam. Time after time I have unsubscribed from the "best products of the week"-newsletter, just to receive a "weekly product highlights"-newsletter the next day. According to the logic of the sending company, this is a completely different newsletter that I also have to unsubscribe from.
I mark all of them as spam. I'm sorry the 99% make life more challenging for you.
Nah. You forgot to quote the key word from those definitions: email. Not "newsletters subscriptions", not "promises to receive interesting emails", not "agreements to get sent x mails per week". Spam is unsolicited and/or unwanted email, period.
It does not matter whether you were tricked into subscribing to some newsletter or whether you checked a "receive interesting emails from us" box while paying for something.
If the email you just received is unsolicited and/or unwanted, then it's spam by definition.
The legacy definition of spam is any unwanted email, or "unsolicited commercial email"
But in the context of social media, what does spam mean? It isn't email. And an awful lot of it is simply self-promotion or commercial promotion.
And many FB groups and the like are permissive when it comes to posts that are really advertisements, or are just one person's definition of "off topic." And there are mechanisms for reporting content as "spam", but what does that even mean when it isn't an email?
I've found that many people have redefined the term "spam" as repetitive content, not unwanted/unsolicited content. I guess this comes from gamer/chat culture where there is talk of "spamming the jump button" or "spamming the chat" where it isn't the content that is remarkable, it is the repetition. You can kind of see where it comes from as most email spammers are quite repetitive and indiscriminate. But a spam email can be just one, and that definition doesn't seem to fly in the inherently noisy social media context.
I was just struck by this evolution of the term spam when I tried reporting some (unwanted by me) commercial self-promotion on social media, only to be told that it wasn't spam at all because the poster only posted it once. I guess a lot of it comes down to how territorial and defensive people are about their email inbox vs. social media feed.
"Unwanted" is hard to define in a way not to include many things. When an acquaintance or relative sends me some bullshit meme or a silly joke, that's an unwanted email. It's not spam though.
That's why there usually needs to be some direct or indirect commercial gain involved too.
> 1. If you subscribe to a list then please please please take the time to locate the very clearly marked unsubscribe link, or use the one that gmail or your other email client shows.
Teaching people to click unsubscribe links in spam emails is horrible security practice. I know you said “if you subscribed to a list” but it’s hard for me to verify that the sender of the email is the original company I subscribed to.
You mean to say you signed up for a service or subscribed to a newsletter, then see an email from the service or newsletter and don’t know if it’s really that company/person?
Did you check the “to”? Do you look at the url of the unsubscribe link? (Harder when click tracking is on, I know)
And you would rather hurt that company or person because you don’t feel like taking the time?
This makes no sense to me, and I hope I’m not in the minority here.
I think he means that a lot of pure-spam emails include an unsubscribe link that actually proves to the spammer that they've reached a live person, and then they'll resell your address to everyone.
It can be difficult to tell if it's a fake UniversalBankCo email or a real one, even if you are a UniversalBankCo customer.
No, if you send an unwanted email people have no obligation to ensure your company preserves a good spam rating, and are free to do whatever they want to do with your email.
The good news is that if you improve your process and send less unwanted emails, they'll be less flagged as spam and you'll keep a good spam rating. The system works basically.
The system that you’re talking about is heavily weighted towards sending more stuff to spam than not.
Keeping a good spam rating is an extreme challenge for legit senders, especially when so many people click the spam button for reasons that have to do with laziness and carelessness.
Lasiness and carelessness?
If people click the spam button, you are sending them content they find annoying, end of story.
No need to bring personal defaults into that, your service is not entitled to their attention.
I'm on several mailing lists from US companies that use Cloudflare country filters or similar technologies to block non-US traffic to their sites. So since moving out of the US I have no way of unsubscribing and no way of contacting them, so they all get reported as spam.
Keep this in mind if you run a list and are ever tempted to mass block traffic from your site.
The problem is the one of scale and time waste: you are asking recipients to decide whether your email is mass-spam, commercial unsolicited email (also spam), something they subscribed to using a dark pattern (prechecked checkbox), something they subscribed to on purpose (and how long ago). To top it all off, some use those unsubscribe links or embedded images to track and confirm how real a recipient is. And many an unsubscribe link is simply broken.
You have to accept the reality that in very few cases people want these emails, so you are asking them to expend the effort in deciphering origin, purpose and viability of unsubscribing for the few where it will work.
If you are in the legitimate email business, you should design around this reality.
So, I should navigate to an external webpage (which can include other forms of tracking) to unsubscribe from an email that was unsolicited? Personally, I'd rather just flag it as junk/spam.
I'm kind of sympathetic to your plight, at least until I get here:
> Now, if you can’t unsubscribe (because there’s no link, it’s broken, or simply doesn’t actually unsubscribe), and this is a legit company, please please please let them know.
No chance I'm taking the time to do that. 99.99% they already know that it's broken and either made it that way intentionally or intentionally refuse to fix it to boost some kind of performance metrics. Why take the time to contact them? To the spam-filter it rightly goes.
Divorce yourself from this notion that it's sometimes okay to send it. It's not just a newsletter. It don't care that you now offer free delivery. If the recipient didn't explicitly ask you for marketing communications, you're just as bad as the people offering penis enlargement pills. That's why you get treated the same.
If it is something I asked for, I will click the unsubscribe link.
The most annoying thing for me is when my users flag a transactional email as spam (I don’t send marketing). What you don’t want your text only receipt?!
So I reached out to a few of my users to figure out why they were flagging their receipt as spam... turns out they don’t differentiate between the “spam” button and the “delete” button. So really they just didn’t care to have their receipt (perfectly legit) and are clicking whatever button removes it.
The button could say “Launch Nukes” and if removes the message from their immediate view they’ll push it.
I have a fundamental issue with "Unsubscribe". In most cases I want to be removed from their registry/"right to be forgotten".
"Unsubscribe" is a smokescreen for the above purpose. Most people believe that "Unsubscribe" makes these companies go away, but in reality it just hides the fact that they still own some of your data. And if it is companies like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, they tend to follow you around the web, even if you haven't logged on to their service at the time (this has been discussed plenty).
I am in EU, so GDPR applies. I prefer to (instead) take a few mins and either respond and/or respond and include their "privacy@example.com" asking them as per GDPR to delete me from their records, which they (most) claim to have done so.
In some extreme cases, I filter to auto-delete their crap. I understand the grandfather of this post claiming that we should make the effort to do things clean and neat (which I honestly do and urge friends and family to also do), but there is an imbalance here. Some companies act in a very unethical way. They take the (beneficial to them) gamble that most people will prefer to flag as spam, than go through the multiple hoops of "Unsubscribing". The fact that he/she acts ethically, caring for the marketing effectiveness of his/her efforts makes him the minority (imho).
I don't hate advertisements or advertisers. They are people too. I just dislike the practices of the majority of marketers.
> I have a fundamental issue with "Unsubscribe". In most cases I want to be removed from their registry/"right to be forgotten".
Right, but that's not an unsubscribe issue. You're not trying to unsubscribe from someone's mailing list, you're trying to be removed entirely from their database. They're entirely separate things.
I get where you're coming from, but I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. Outside of these mailing lists I never even subscribed to but magically got added to on signing up or what not, I don't receive any spam. Spam in the way it used to be is not a problem today. The mailing list _is_ the spam, and if reporting it makes the spammy business less viable, that's a double win.
I mark marketing email as spam, and not because it's easier than unsubscribing.
The vast majority of spam I receive is marketing emails from legitimate companies I bought something from, and who mistakenly think this means I want their marketing emails. I never deliberately subscribe to marketing emails, so if I get one then either:
1) They sent me marketing email without asking, therefore they deserve to be marked as spammers and get the associated hassle.
2) They had some pre-ticked "send me spam" tickybox on a web page designed to distract attention from it, therefore they deserve to be marked as spammers and get the associated hassle.
If the recipient wants to unsubscribe after receiving an automated email, then by definition that mail was spam to them (literally unwanted mail). So marking that mail as "spam" is the correct thing to do, and nobody should care about the sender's feelings nor should they abide by the sender's pleas.
It is up to the sender (1) not to gaud people into subscribing to their newsletters in the first place, and (2) to send actually useful and interesting content to their subscribers.
When I started teaching and my school email address was published on the school's website, I discovered the hell that is the ed-tech marketing machine. 90% of the spam I get from these sources, which are usually individual sales reps of medium to large companies, lack any unsubscribe link whatsoever. And these are firms with which I have zero relationship or transaction history.
> Now, if you can’t unsubscribe (because there’s no link, it’s broken, or simply doesn’t actually unsubscribe), and this is a legit company, please please please let them know.
I mostly agree with you, but this point only works if the company is contactable. There are some companies sending stuff from no reply addresses.
Those I just spam. At that scale companies need to be testing, if they’ve left no way to be reached.
Knowing that it makes people in your line of work cringe makes marking newsletters as spam even more satisfying, so thank you for telling me this. I hope you all cringe so hard your faces get stuck like that.
You missed that key line. It may surprise you because you personally don’t do this, but regular people love signing up for email newsletters.
This is very different from email sent unexpectedly when you make an account somewhere. The OP was clearly talking about a list the user has asked to receive.
These tend to have fairly clear unsubscribe links in the footer.
IME "asked for" is too often code for "bought something 5 years ago", "didn't read the terms and conditions". Rarely real, informed consent.
The one exception —again, just in my 20 years experience doing this crap— is when you pay them, eg "10% off your first order when you subscribe to our newsletter". This is still more coerced consent than informed, but better than most subscriptions.
As someone who's been doing email marketing for a decade, you'd be subscribed by how many people are more than happy to sign up to a mailing list without being "coerced" as you describe.
We get that you don't like marketing email, but plenty of people do.
It's not just my bias. I'm sensitive to it, but I'm regularly added to mailing lists despite my express lack of consent. We all are.
I also regularly walk clients back from doing exactly the same thing. The perks in marketing don't give a flying French Fancy what the law is. They care about absolute volume.
I did a little exercise last year, took a screenshot of every order form I submitted. I reported a dozen companies to the ICO last year, with documented examples of companies wilfully ignoring GDPR regulations.
How does this work from a technical perspective? If I forward mail to this service instead of clicking the 'unsubscribe' link, then how do they 'unsubscribe' me on my behalf? In order to complete the unsubscription process, the newsletter owner needs to receive an email (usually generated automatically by the mail client when clicking the 'unsubscribe link') that comes from the person being unsubscribed. If I outsource this process, this means that 'please-unsubscribe.com' will need to spoof emails from me on my behalf and send them the email specified in the List-Unsubscribe email header. If spoofed emails are not used and they come from 'please-unsubscribe.com' this won't be very actionable to the newsletter owner. From their perspective, they're now going to get 'unsubscribe' notifications that all come from an email at 'please-unsubscribe.com' which never signed up to the newsletter in the first place.
This all assumes that the newsletter unsubscription process is using the email based method instead of the link based method (which is a good assumption email-based is more common).
It's not at all common anymore to use email replies for unsubscribing. All the marketing emails I get have unsubscribe links, and it's been that way for a few years at least.
I just checked a few newsletter emails in my inbox, and they all offer List-Unsubscribe: mailto: based unsubscription. From what I see, it is quite universal and more common than link-based unsubscription. Newsletter providers prefer not to use the url based unsubscription because some email providers will crawl the URLs in emails and automatically unsubscribe people without them knowing.
It's also possible that you're talking about a 'link' (a href) in the email body that goes to the newsletter provider's site and ask them a bunch of questions (why are you unsubscribing etc.). That's a different concept entirely.
From what I've seen, the email-based way is the primary unsubscription method in use today. Even when you use the gmail feature "Mark this as spam", depending on what you click, it will just send an email on your behalf to the to whatever is specified in the List-Unsubscribe: mailto: header.
> From what I've seen, the email-based way is the primary unsubscription method in use today.
It's not. Most people unsubscribe by clicking a link in the email.
What you're referring to is the list-unsub header which is again a different concept to what the person above you is saying regarding replying to an email and asking to be opted out.
It may very well be the case that users more often click a link to unsubscribe directly on the site more than they click the 'unsubscribe' feature in the email client (I don't have any stats on that).
The original question remains though: How does the stated service here work when there is only a List-Unsubscribe: header and no web form?
I think the way you've set it up is really great, allowing the user to try out/start using the product and just let them when they owe money seems very simple.
However, personally I would not use it as I find it easy to unsubscribe via gmail already.
Yeah, Gmail is nice because it shows a little gray unsubscribe link that they pluck out. I use Thunderbird with Protonmail and it doesn't have that... and I really don't want to go back to Gmail :/
The pricing for this is ridiculous. Far easier to just unsubscribe + report to spam + set a filter if that doesn't work. This takes almost no time for me currently because I unsubscribe diligently.
Screenshots including potential personal data contained in forwarded emails?
How long amd where are these screenshots stored and what happens to them afterwards?
Is there some way to add this as some kind of browser extension? I can totally see using this for people’s parents as long as they just get a big fat unsubscribe button in their UI.
You can use an email alias service to create a different email address for each service. You can just disable or remove this address to unsubscribe from a service. SimpleLogin, 33mail do that.
That’s not always so easy to find, it’s often in a small font in a hardly visible color at the bottom of the email. Having a button that’s always on the same position is more useful.
So I’ve heard. I’ve become more sensitive lately about providing external services my data.
While I can’t avoid Google completely, I don’t use their web or mobile apps. Same goes for other services, though the issue with google connecting the dots on my online interactions is probably higher than with a small service. There on the other hand security is a higher issue than with Google with many SREs on call if something happens, so at the end of the day I prefer an offline service/program to parse my emails for the inscribe button.
Haha! That's so expensive. 10 quid a month for the sometimes minor convenience of not hitting the block button when an email has no unsubscribe at the bottom. Is this really the same value as comparably priced subscription services? How did they come up with this pricing model?
Where you gotten that idea from? Don't think this is true. I've never worked at a company that stopped sending emails because the trackers didn't work, and I haven't had remote content enabled for 15 years and I still get spam.
Is it maybe supposed to be a joke? Went past me in that case.
As someone with this disabled for 15+ years on lots of different accounts/domains/services: this is definitely not the case.
It's possible there's less than there would otherwise be (impossible to know), and it's a really good idea to disable either way. Same with read receipts - I'm not sure if they're used for spam, but their mere existence is just obnoxious and rude.
I don't think it breaks any rules but one benefit of prefixing it with Show HN is that it shows up on https://news.ycombinator.com/show (Launch HN does as well but only the "official" ones). Not that it matters considering your post is almost #1 on the front page even without that extra exposure.
The unsubscribe link often has dark patterns to try and defeat your attempt so I can see some getting frustrated and giving up. So maybe for the less technically inclined?
They've made it a lot easier, because now you're not required to sign-in -- which is why this product works.
I just pay my high-school sister $15/hour to manually dig through the links and check unsubscribe for each mailing list for you.
As a tech worker, throwing $5/month to saving me frustration is worth it. Sure, you're exposing your email -- but I'm also exposing my email on my personal website, and literally any company I register on.
I've attacked the problem from a different angle though - I've tried to automate the service a lot more. Automatically looking for the unsubscribe button and filling out any HTML forms that appear etc. It doesn't always work but it's been fun trying to work out ways to automate the different steps etc.
If anyone is interested in a similar product with a slightly different way of doing things, different pricing and a web UI, please check out: https://www.stopthat.email/
Hopefully you don't mind the health competition ryanmjacobs.