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Comment by hotsauceror | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Any time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email, that takes me to a site where I have to provide my email or indeed, do anything more than click “confirm,” I leave. I assume it either resets some kind of consent trigger or sells my data to a new third-party vendor. The assumption of bad faith is now baked into my interaction with almost every corporate entity.

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Sometimes the people who set up the email service just forget or don't bother to add the receivers email to the URL parameter when you click unsubscribe, so it'll ask for your email again which is always an annoying step.

I refuse to believe that “someone just forgot” to implement a user-friendly feature whose omission coincidentally benefits their company. It is not a coincidence, and it was not done unintentionally. The same way that it is not a coincidence that the “unsubscribe” link is always in six-point font the same color as the rest of the email footer. Code does not happen in a vacuum. Code does not get pushed to production without vetting and approval. As I say, the assumption of bad faith is baked in.

That’s their mistake, and any other email I receive from them will be flagged as spam and sent to the junk folder.

I’m not in the business of fixing their mistakes for free.

I will click the unsubscribe link and that’s it.

Could be a way of saving computation, this way the email content is the exact same for everyone receiving it

It's a dark pattern which adds friction to the process, in order to reduce the number of unsubscribes.

There are plenty of dark patterns in digital marketing, and you're generally right about the thinking.

But there is a (somewhat plausible) defense here: if someone forwards you an email and you hit the unsubscribe link, then it unsubscribes them; not you. Requiring the user to enter their email helps ensure you don't accidentally unsubscribe the wrong person.

That said — the most impactful thing anyone can do to punish dark pattern digital marketing behavior is to report the message as SPAM in your email client. That'll hurt their delivery rates and damage their sending reputation with email providers.

> But there is a (somewhat plausible) defense here: if someone forwards you an email and you hit the unsubscribe link, then it unsubscribes them; not you.

Pre-filling the address in the field is easy and prevents that. But if I get redirected to an empty address field, I immediately close and mark as spam. I refuse to reward that behavior.

I think they’re doing it because of your exact behavior: one-click unsubscribe links are easy to do even if you’re on mobile and aren’t giving the process your full attention. Making you enter your email is a barrier.

They already know your email, I don’t see why getting it again would sell it to a new vendor. Clicking an unsubscribe link already verifies you are a real person.

Very true, the act of unsubscribing itself signifies that the email is still live; more bad faith. As to why not sell it to a new vendor, because that would allow them to check a box that says “we offer a feature that allows users to opt out of data sharing agreement with the partners defined in the TOS and onboarding process.”

Thankfully most let you opt out with a single click - but if not I will put the whole domain in my killfile, so I won’t get any emails from them ever again

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