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Comment by prawn | Hacker News Reader

(Half-baked thinking, so may or may not work.)

Anyone else wonder if unsubscribe links couldn't be shifted to the mail client somehow? That way, they could be positioned in a uniform place and handled in a simple way so that you didn't have to scrounge through an email footer looking for the 5px unsub link, and then go through that horrible 'You need a password to unsubscribe' process half the time.

I'm imagining an 'unsubscribe' button up near the top of the email, maybe based on mail headers or something else, that just worked. You clicked it and you were off the list. (Might need ways to verify the identity of the subscriber, but I'd hope this could be handled better than it is now.)

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Gmail already does this - if you have the List-Unsubscribe header set up, when someone clicks on the "Spam" button, it asks them whether they want to unsubscribe as well. If they say "yes", an email gets sent to the unsubscribe address with "Unsubscribe" as the subject.

I think I've seen that once (not a big Gmail user yet).

Would love to see it in all mail clients, and useful for all subscriptions. A 1998 RFC and a basic attempt from one webmail provider is a bit depressing in 2010 when most of us get hammered by these sorts of messages.

The people who would comply with that header are the sort of people who probably already had a very easy to find unsubscribe link.

I take your point, but that link is still down the bottom of a long newsletter (that I already don't want to read), in small, faint type. And then half the time, the unsubscribe process will involve a password, verification of the email sent to (which often could be one of a few), or waiting for an 'are you sure' link to be emailed.

I don't think I'm alone in refusing to believe that the processes here (and all around email) couldn't be improved!

Yup, that's fair. I think best practice in email design is to put the unsubscribe at the top and bottom.

And I would point out that requiring a password or a verification email is almost certainly a violation of CAN-SPAM.

Gmail sometimes does this when a message is reported as spam. It will ask if you want gmail to attempt to automatically unsubscribe you. I assume that the emailer provides some sort of header info to gmail that allows it to do that, perhaps to receive a higher likelihood of not getting put in the spam folder to begin with, but I do not know. See:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...

It already exists: RFC2369 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2369.html

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