I want a "plonk" button in Gmail | Hacker News Reader

I want a "plonk" button in Gmail

workin-progress.posterous.com

39 pointskolinko38 comments

I am surprised that there are people that actually unsubscribe from newsletters. I never to that. Instead I filter out the sender from my Gmail

ummm, why surprised? why have your email in a database you don't want to use, or why have it send emails you won't read anyway? I think unsubscribing is fair for both sides.

it takes time to unsubscribe, sometimes it's not that easy and sometimes "unsubscribe" is not respected (or mysterious "server error prevents me from unsubscribing) - of course that's not the case of yahoo groups or google groups, but there are quite a few companies that do that.

Most of the time when I unsubscribe it is easy and respected by the sender. When it is not I resort to the gmail filters as a backup.

The vast majority of the time it's a one or two click process. A few sites require you to log in to change your email preferences, but they're few and far between.

The one exception I can think of off the top of my head is MTV Networks, who got a hold of my email somehow and won't stop spamming me, even after I've unsubscribed at least a dozen times.

That's what I'm talking about. We are hackers. Why should we settle for a mediocre solution (like fighting with MTV from time to time) when there is a better around the corner?

A better solution isn't to just block all unwanted messages... a better solution would attempt to unsubscribe, and only if that doesn't work, block the sender.

A better solution is one button which both attempts to automatically unsubscribe, and blocks further emails if the list does not respect the user's choice.

Why should I have to do extra work just because MTV is hostile to users? Or because Hallmark's database takes 10 days to update, gamespot's unsubscribe servers are permanently broken, or because some crappy website demands your login info?

http://imgur.com/mzqKk http://imgur.com/Yn5eD http://i.imgur.com/yoky5.jpg

Google's Report Spam button is actually pretty close to that. If the message has a List-Unsubscribe header, it offers to use that after hitting the Spam button.

And usually they don't really take 10 days, but that's the limit the law permits so they give themselves as much wiggle room as possible.

I agree with yummyfajitas' take. My rebuttals to some of the other comments in this thread so far:

1. It's not "harsh" to mark anything as spam in your email; the only person it affects is you. The sender will not, of course, even know whether you've classified their stuff as spam.

2. Some commenters are claiming that it's not that much extra effort to visit the sender's site and unsubscribe yourself. This is manifestly not always the case, and more to the point, the user does not KNOW in advance whether it will be the case, when starting the process. However, hitting a plonk button in your mail client will always have a known time-suck-factor in advance.

3. Hitting a plonk button is also, of course, guaranteed to be at least one page-load and one click easier than any possible solution involving visiting a sender's website. Even if there's an unsub link in the spammy email itself, a plonk button is still one page-load less, and easier to find from a UI standpoint. So in sum, plonk is guaranteed to win from on ease of use. Not even a debatable question.

4. Some argue that taking time to unsubscribe yourself via the sender's website is just "the right thing to do", given that you subscribed to their emails in the first place. It seems to me that it should be incumbent on the marketer, not the customer, to make unsubscribing as easy as possible, and to "do the right thing". This should be the default.

ad 1. I'm not sure if this is the case for gmail but when you use a spam filter that is fed by many people there is a chance that you're classification of that mail as spam affects other people. If you use some sort of self-adapting, learning spam filter, you will be affected too because you mark mail as spam that looks like normal mail.

To put it simple: the spam button is for spam = unwanted mass mails, mostly ads. For unwanted mail from specific users, you should create a filter.

My personal take on this though is: People who found out how to subscribe to a mailing list, should also be able to unsubscribe.

>To put it simple: the spam button is for spam = unwanted mass mails

Spam is unsolicited. If you've signed up for a newsletter, or similar, then you've requested the messages.

For what it's worth, it is actually illegal for US-based companies to require a login or any other nonsense to unsubscribe. CAN-SPAM (for all its many faults) is actually pretty specific about making unsubscribing from a newsletter very easy.

That seems like a good idea, until you plonk your US Airways newsletter and realize that you've plonked future flight confirmations as well.

it's still in the archive and usually newsletters are sent from a different mails than newsletters.

there could be also some other mechanisms (filtering titles?) - come on, I'm sure there are solutions that won't require me to get through four separate screens and interrupt my workflow!

Is it really a regular part of your workflow? How often are you unsubscribing from lists?

Maybe just archive them when you are in the middle of workflow, then have a weekly time when you work up filtering for the non-spam unwanted email you got that week.

The priority inbox feature seems like it was made for you as well.

Yes, this is precisely what I thought. I have a gmail label, "bacon," for such cases. I filter bacon by applying the label and then skipping the inbox (archiving). So, for example, my Priceline junk mail doesn't appear in my inbox, but it's not lost if I ever do make a priceline request.

I call it marketing, but it would be nice if there were a way to add an address to the filter with a single click.

There already is. Its built into emails already.

If your username for gmail is user@gmail.com ...

Now if you want to use ebay with that address, use user+ebay@mail.com Now all mails will come in, pre-tagged for bins. They've done your work, for you.

Edit: its also good for finding out who's sharing addresses without your consent.

That works OK until you hit a site that has a weird method of processing payments, and now you can't pay for your order from email+weirdsite@mail.com because your paypal address is email+paypal@mail.com and they have to "match" (and ofc you had no way of knowing this before signing up). Or the sites that don't think "+" is a valid email address character. Or the sites that strip out the "+blabla" because they've decided they're too special for filtering.

Will that automatically archive them?

And besides, many sites that are necessary for doing business think luke+priceline@somewhere.com is an invalid email address. (And all of Priceline's competitors agree, and Kayak/Hipmunk are meta-search engines so don't solve the problem.)

That said, Priceline does allow you to unsubscribe from their marketing and only receive relevant emails, which is probably the ideal place to attack this problem.

That is why marketing and sales should have separate communication channels.

From the point of view of the company sending the email, this is why marketing and sales _shouldn't_ have separate channels.

Obviously, unsubscribing is more polite.

That said, maybe GMail and friends could add a button based on a List-unsubscribe header?

If you mark a message as spam and there's a Unsubscribe header, Gmail asks you if you want to unsubscribe from the mailing list itself.

Marking a newsletter you signed up for as "spam" seems pretty harsh.

I usually unsubscribe first, but often these newsletters, which I'm automatically placed on when I order something, or do anything on the site that includes giving out my email, don't respect the request. At that point, "mark as spam" is the appropriate option, but even that doesn't always work and I end up making a filter to delete the messages immediately.

I've never signed up for an email newsletter in 15 years online and I get 100 messages a day into my Gmail junk folder, and 10 into my inbox, masquerading as newsletters. They're spam. Pretending that people sign up for these things is a tactic the spammers are using to discourage constructive discussion.

>Pretending that people sign up for these things is a tactic the spammers are using to discourage constructive discussion.

It was quite common back before RSS feeds and always on internet. One would have newsletters delivered to a MUA and then go offline to save precious minutes from your heady 14.4kbps connection costs.

People still do sign up for newsletters. But there is also a lot of spam masquerading as requested mail.

Gmail can take a "report spam" as unsubscribe request, for some mailing lists. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-eas...

oh, I didn't know about this header... now I'm even more surprised by a lack of "plonk" feature.

I think that if I'm taking the time to sign up for a newsletter and add to the costs of hosting that email account, then unsubscribing when I no longer need it is the right thing to do. I also find it to be the easiest thing to do.

In the few cases where I unsub and still get emails, I'd prefer the "Report as Spam" button would just block that sender's address in the future.

Don't see the point. Unsubscribing is generally faster than going through the motions of setting up a filter. It's also much more polite. I reserve filters or "mark as spam" for only the stuff with a missing or malfunctioning unsubscription option.

Well - that is the point! The filter should be faster than the "Unsubscribe"! :)

I'm not convinced this is a real problem though. I don't think I've ever thought to myself "man, hitting this unsubscribe link is so annoying, I wish there was a better way!". Plus, why keep all of these emails in a label when you can just opt-out of them at the source?

gmail actually will attempt to unsubscribe you automatically when you mark a newsletter as spam, sometimes.

screenshot: http://imgur.com/HqbVm

so it seems they are trying to solve this problem in a more complete way then filtering the mail thru personal mail filters.

A couple of companies regularly sent me spam disguised as a newsletter. I'm completely sure I didn't subscribe to anything from them. Their unsubscribe systems and polite requests didn't work. The worst was that GMail didn't learn to mark them as spam.

I found a nice GMail feature: I could create a filter that killed their spam from my inbox and then sent a copy of the message to the addresses that I chose, that were the abuse, postmaster, etc. that previously had ignored me. I also added addresses from DNS database and the staff of the spammers.

Unfortunately this feature seems to be disabled for some time now. The filters I created are still there, but I can't create more of their kind.

Windows Live Hotmail already does a similar thing with its new Sweep feature.

cool! :)

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