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Comment by eof | Hacker News Reader

70 pointseof21 comments

This is easy to solve for the developers.

Just generate a unsubscribe url for each user and send the same link on every email. Something like http://www.example.com/newsletter/unsubscribe?id=6e85d15bdbd...

A simple newsletter registration doesn't require that much security anyways.

Also dont require me to email you from the address that I want to unsubscribe. Most of my email is forwarded. A token in a URL is all that is needed, like maushu said.

Previously I have just created a filter to archive the email rather than hitting spam, but flagging it would do more damage to the sender. I guess I'll consider next time if its bad enough that their poor admin needs to deal with his domains being blacklisted. It's almost certainly not his fault after all, but all the misery will be dumped on him when "THE EMAILS ARENT GETTING THROUGH!"

More generally, if a company wants me to do something and requires me to log in to do it, I'm probably not going to. I'm talking to you, Meetup.

like what? If you don't login then how do they know 'you'?

Are you saying that they should be able to know you via link hash? For single actions like 'confirm' or yes/no I would agree that it would be easier to not need to be logged in.

Can I ask you this, have you never not logged in and left the action not done? Or do you log in begrudgingly anyway?

If I get a unique link and click it, it's me. You don't have to verify the login, because if I don't remember the password, I'm just going to reset it via the exact same email address I got the link from. Also, it's likely that if someone sends me a newsletter, I used a one off password for that site and I would have to do the reset anyways.

If the unsubscribe action chain is longer than setting up a new email filter - you're doing it wrong. Not the OP, but I do leave and add the address to auto-spam as soon as I need to log in / do something else.

Except then if you forward that newsletter or message to anyone else, you've unwittingly sent them your login credentials as well!

Meetups I was planning on attending have been cancelled because it was too much trouble for me and the other 3 people also planning on attending to carry out all the steps necessary to RSVP on meetup.com.

Once I had to:

  1) Click the unsubscribe link
  2) Uncheck a bunch of never seen before mailing lists subcategories
  3) Enter e-mail address
  4) Enter captcha
  5) Check Are you sure? box
  6) Click Save

BAD BAD BAD user experience.

I always assumed these BAD experiences were done on purpose. The more steps involved, the less likely you'll go through them all.

I hate it when this happens, especially because I read most of my email on my phone and I can't be bothered to go through all that. So I just mark as spam.

ebay?

Theirs is the worst I've ever experienced.

Think I eventually had to close my ebay account entirely to get rid of all mail (which was after 4 support tickets).

This was my wife's experience. She recently signed up for her own eBay account with her work email (she was buying me a Christmas present, ha) and was dismayed at the amount of spam they sent. Went through exactly this and was in utter outrage that eBay said she might still get spam for up to four weeks.

I don't know how typical she is, but you do wonder whether eBay's mercenary attitude towards spam isn't a detriment to their public reputation.

Been there but with a confirmation email at the end...

If the email is sent by a US company and you can't unsubscribe in two clicks, they are probably violating the CAN-SPAM act and you could most likely sue them if you were so inclined.

Ticket master needs 72 hours to unsubscribe from their mailing list. I cant begin to fathom the logic behind this.

I'll just guess that their email marketing database is separate from their users database and there is an update process that runs nightly to add or remove contacts and their preferences. However if there is a problem during the update, they want to be sure they have given a large enough window of time to correct it without either exceeding the time frame given to the user or having to shut down emailing until the problem is fixed. The other possibility is that they queue up email jobs for approval a couple days in advance instead of pulling the data from a live system when it is time to go out.

It could well be that they have a 'service provider' for bulk email that requires a list of email addresses and content to be handed over in advance. I can't imagine what effects it would have on user privacy though.

Or perhaps the text was written by someone who had no idea of how subscribe/unsubscribe worked and took a 'reasonable' guess.

They just want to make it effort. O well. Spam.

Upvoting so more people see this topic, and commenting to say I do the same. Making it easy for users to get off your list is worth the effort both in terms of managing your brand's perception, and making sure your deliverability stays high.

wow, serendipitous timing! I am writing my first email newsletter and my unsub was to login to change your pref. Guess I may need to look at way to update my db from Sendgrid.

same here, I feel guilty for clicking 'spam' on emails that do not really spam but demand me to login and and change subscription settings of my account, which takes way more than 5 clicks but I still click on 'spam' because it is easier and faster and because the sender could insert a 'unsubscribe' link in every email but for some reason did not.

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