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Comment by schmorptron | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, these days I'll click the unsubscribe link in newsletters and stuff, but if they expect me to click on another small link on a website or even enter my email again I just go back and report it as spam. Spoken to some friends who do the same, and I feel that this is the only reasonable approach to take with this.

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This is why a legit newsletter might have a confirm step:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469535

I’ve had to deal with customers angry they did not get emails they wanted, and we tracked it back to a security service at their employer that auto-clicks all email links to check them. We had to add a confirm step to unsubscribe to keep it from happening. We’re B2B and I suspect it’s a much bigger issue than B2C because so many companies run custom email setups.

You might be able to check the user agent to differentiate legitimate users from automated scanners?

There's always the chance that they use a browser's user agent to disguise themselves but that should be easy to check.

I bet most scanners use a "human looking" user agent otherwise it would be trivial to cloak the page when the scanner checks it.

You know what, that's a pretty good reason. Guess I'll add "click an unsubscribe button on a simple website" to my list of acceptable ways to handle unsubscribing. :)

Which isn’t related to what you are replying to. We are talking of legit newsletter that offer 1 click unsubscribe.

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