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Bots acting on the behalf of users should not be blocked but we have spent several decades treating bots (except for the googlebot) as bad.

Like if I want to programmatically unsubscribe from a subscription, why should I have to do it myself?

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That's a bad example, "programmatically unsubscribing" means giving spammers information that this address is alive. A much better solution is to report the unwanted email as SPAM, so the sender's reputation takes a hit.

(and for that 1% of the cases where the address is not a spammer and user knows it, they can just hit "unsubscribe" manually)

I’m talking about subscription services a user signed up for at one time

That's a bad example, there's already the List-Unsubscribe header.

Subscription services like Netflix, not emails.

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