Ask HN: What is your favourite way of unsubscribe from emails and why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your favourite way of unsubscribe from emails and why?

11 pointsniksmac23 comments

Hey, I used to get a minimum of 10 unwanted/promotional emails a day, even if I set up the username+RAND@gmail.com method in my email.

My way of cancelling my subscription is by pressing the "Report Spam" button in the Gmail web client.

Why? Because i read somewhere that they have been recording the unsubscription email accounts and marking it as "Active" and using it for other activities. However i used to unsubscribe if the link leads somewhere like http://.us.list-manage.com for obvious reasons.

What are your methods of unsubscribing? Is there any other tools to issue a Bounce response, based on some filters?

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If there is a vey obvious link that immediately unsubscribes me then I will use it. By immediately I mean "when I click this link I am removed from all future mailings without having to do anything else and without a delay".

If it asks me to confirm my email address or asks any other action or uses deliberately confusing double negatives ("confirm which email lists you don't want to stop receiving") or asks me anything else before confirming my opt out then I will immediately return to gmail and click "report spam".

I run a fully opted in newsletter and very occasionally see "reported as spam" in my dashboard which I assume means this action still has some very minor negative action for the sender if they are using a third party provider (mailchimp etc) to manage their campaigns.

"unsubscribe" should mean unsubscribe not "present me a number of options to try and confuse people into staying".

I notice that with some campaigns when you hit "report spam" in gmail it asks if you would like to unsubscribe. I'm happy to do that if it's presented as an option - though I haven't seen it for a while.

I appreciate your thoughts on "unsubscribe" should mean unsubscribe not "present me a number of options to try and confuse people into staying". Makes a lot of sense, yet nobody seems to follow.

I recently did an email cleanup and appreciate that it seems like ConstantContact did that.

I wish mailman would. Does anyone know if the maintainer would be willing to accept a patch?

I have a gmail filter that sends all emails with the word 'unsubscribe' to a special folder. I check the unsubscribe folder about once a week to make sure I didn't miss anything important. It doesn't completely solve the problem of spammy emails but it causes them to not be a distraction when I'm trying to process emails written by actual humans.

Wow, basically extra work for you weekly?

How is it extra work if you have to do it anyway? If anything, it's slightly less work to go through it all at once.

I use some of the unsubscribe options when the sender seems reputable, in other cases I am worried to use it, as perhaps they are just sending out emails to get a confirmation that the account is valid so they can then spam it all the more.

Our emails go via a host which provides a CPANEL interface, and from there I have a rule for all inboxes which I add to (for deleting spam), on average, once a week. There are probably a few hundred entries on the rule, but overtime it has worked very well. It normally takes me a few moments to add a new entry to the rule list, just because I try to be very careful to ensure I won't delete any important emails.

In gmail i have 200+ filters that archive content based on senders. Twitter, facebook and linkeding are all going directly to archived. I use the email+junk@gmail.com trick when on dodgy websites. Sometimes they refuse this kind of email though. I rarely bother to unsub with the link, making a filter is faster. As a web app dev, I did implement a one click usub, but some noob users clicked it by mistake. Because emailing is essential in my app (it's the entry point to the shop), I did a slightly more complicated unsub workflow to avoid mistakes.

+1 for the email+junk@gmail.com trick, one of my personal favourite and it works most of the time. :D

I am very curious to know what is the "email+junk" trick? I tried googling but it yielded no helpful result.

A lot of email providers support aliases using the + symbol. If your email address was foo@example.com, then foo+bar@example.com would also work and be delivered to your inbox.

This is a good way of finding out what company sold your email address too.

I just press unsubscribe and I have never seen anyone doing something nefarious. I rarely get subscription emails from things I haven't signed up to to begin with.

Instead of trying to unsubscribe to unsolicited marketing emails, I simply mark them as Junk mail. I can do this with a single keystroke in my email reader (I'm using the Mail app on a Mac). All subsequent email from the same address goes into my Junk folder automatically.

Well, even if I mark it as junk from my iPhone, it again appears in my inbox which is irritating for me.

+1 This is what I've been doing lately.

After I left a public facing role I had to deal with stopping a lot of spam. Apparently everyone with something to sell thinks the fact my email address was published on the website meant I was actively trying to subscribe to their nonsense.

I found that a polite email to customer service and/or abuse contacts at the technically-this-side-of-legal spamhouses (constant contact, mailchimp, etc) is usually enough to get yourself on a sitewide blacklist.

I have a (couple of) catchall domain, and so give every form a randomly generated email that I store in my KeePass database along with the randomly generated password.

Then I just set-up a blackhole for the email once they begin getting spammy. It also helps me avoid phishing attempts, as an email from MyBank(TM) would only be addressed to a random email that only MyBank(TM) has any right knowing.

> What are your methods of unsubscribing?

My favourite is not to subscribe in the first place. My second favourite is to add a position to sieve filter.

I am hearing sieve filter for the first time. Language semantics looks interesting and straight forward. Disappointed about the client support. Mostly I am on Apple/iOS Mail or web Gmail.

Radical way is to get a completely new email address and start using it as your primary email from now on (on all your devices).

And this time be more careful and don't sign up for random websites. Keep your original email address as a backup but you can disable any notifications from it.

I'll click unsubscribe for some of my users (I manage about 6-10 mailboxes) if I feel that the sender isn't honoring my request or requires I sign in to complete the request then I black list the domain.

I always click the unsubscribe link. I get maybe one or two unwanted emails every week.

Single mouse click, enough said.

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