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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately for us, the Privacy team at our org has determined that a one-click unsubscribe link in the body of the email is unacceptable (passing an identifier into the URL of the link). So we accept either the client unsubscribe link, or users who click the unsubscribe link in the email have to provide their email address on the unsubscribe page.

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That's rather ridiculous. There's a good reason not to put a one-click unsubscribe button in the email (email scanners will GET every URL you link to check for malware and you end up auto-unsubbing your recipients) but emails already inherently contain personal information: the email address they're directed to.

What was the legal reasoning behind this?

If someone gets forwarded the email and they take action based on another person, or erroneously get unsubscribed by an email scanning tool, those are no-no events according to our lawyers.

Keep in mind our webforms you can put whatever email you want in them. But something to do with the fact that we are knowingly storing the information and it crosses to another system.

That shouldn't stop you from including such a link in the header and keep the non-oneclick link in the footer. Nowadays, emails are forwarded embedded, not as EML attachments, so the header link wouldn't be included. You have to jump through hoops to forward as EML.

Yes, that's what we do. We have the one-click through the client at the top, and the link at the bottom takes you to a more robust "preference center" that combines preferences from multiple systems (marketing, sales, product, etc).

That doesn't stop people from sending in a spate of complaint emails every single day. But this is kind of the local minimum we have found and no one really wants to mess with it at this point.

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