Gmail auto-unsubscribe simplifies your life | Hacker News Reader

Gmail auto-unsubscribe simplifies your life

itworld.com

54 pointsabennett28 comments

They should let you unsubscribe without reporting as spam. As far as I'm concerned, anyone whose mailing list I ended up on as a result of a purchase and who lets me end it with one click shouldn't have their email delivery system damaged by spam reports. Those should be left for the non-opt-in and non-unsubscribable lists.

Think about it this way: when you attempt to unsubscribe, you are in effect telling the mass marketer that this is a live email address. As in, there's an actual human being reading these emails.

Such live email addresses are very valuable to spammers. So this feature is susceptible to abuse by spammers providing the unsubscribe functionality, but only prioritizing the attempted unsubscribers higher in their mailing lists.

So built into their unsubscribe attempt, there needs to be a way to very strictly penalize those who pretend to allow unsubscribes while ignoring them to harvest more email addresses. Hence, they call it "unsubscribe and mark as spam" because any other email messages you receive from that sender will be marked as spam with extreme prejudice.

then add another button that just unsubscribes

Like I already explained: you have to treat all further email to the current address as spam after you unsubscribe.

You completely ignore what I wrote and repeat OP's point without making an argument.

why can't Google "unsubscribe" without labeling the thing as spam. Why can't it block the mail for that one specific user? Being labeled as spam is a BIG deal for companies.

You aren't just labeling it as spam for yourself, you are labeling it as spam for the world. When enough people complain the company will automatically get black listed from that email service Do you think a big company like Amazon shouldn't be able to deliver order confirmations, just because a bunch of people labeled it as spam when they tried to unsubscribe.

Granted that's probably not a big deal for Amazon, since they have connections, but what about all those small startups? Think of a disadvantage they'd get, compared to big boys with name recognition and connections.

It's like that certified email scam. Big companies jump on board, because they can pay the fee. If that ever catches on, you have an additional barrier to entry for the small fish.

Yes, I think a big company like amazon should be notified that its emails are being received as spam. I don't recall asking to hear about "new" books that do not interest me (for example), and rather like the fact that gmail's filter has learned that those messages are really spam, as far as I am concerned.

I really like pg's definition of spam.

This makes sense if all future emails from the sender are marked as spam, but the email I am using to unsubscribe should not be marked as spam.

The button should be "unsubscribe and mark all future emails as spam."

Yes, I agree it's worth clarifying the labels on the buttons. Detailed info what unsubscribe involves might be useful as well.

I'm just brainstorming about the implementation concerns behind this feature.

I usually use "mark as spam" as a "never show me anything like this again, please" button, so I do not really care if the message is really a spam.

What bugs me is that some legit mailing lists are prone to receiving spam once in a while.

I can't bring myself to do that. In my brain "mark as spam" is synonymous to "Mummy! Make the Bad Man go away!". I have trouble overloading this with "Gee I guess I'm just not that into you".

Well, I grew into "Mark as spam" before I got any spam,back when I my email was from a small local ISP and I didn't send many public emails. I taught mozilla's spam filter to recognize the forwarded emails my father sent me (and keep the emails he wrote himself), which were generally junk powerpoint presentations, so for me it's always been a way of saying "gee, I'm just not that into you" (which is also why I think I'd like a bayesian filter to learn my categorizations of messages into labels).

By doing that, you're teaching your mail client and, if your mail is hosted by Google, Gmail that that message was unsolicited and should not have been delivered to you or anyone else. That's bad! The solution is to set up filters to send messages you don't care about to non-inbox folders.

Google (or any other large e-mail provider, for that matter) could significantly decrease the value of an unsubscribe request to a spammer by automatically sending unsubscribe attempts every time an invalid e-mail address is hit with an e-mail with such a link. If spammers can't assume that an unsubscribe response means the e-mail address is live (and further, if the likelihood of a Gmail unsubscribe being a dead address is very high), then the scam no longer has any value to them, and they'll just stop doing it.

...in which case, it's still a useful thing to do, because it helps legitimate companies prune their e-mail databases of garbage addresses.

This just shifts the burden; GMail now becomes a spam reflector to an arbitrary target of your choosing.

I understand the goal but the implementation is a problem.

I personally think this could be worked out by comparing the sender of the email with the unsubscribe link with the recipient of the unsubscribe request and if they aren't related at a certain level, the unsubscribe request wouldn't go through.

Off course, there are probably problems with this, too.

You can - by simply using the normal, mailing list-supplied link to unsubscribe.

The point of having "Unsubscribe" would be to act like a macro: "Please Gmail, take care of telling that marketer that I'm not interested anymore and delete this email as well".

The supplied link isn't always a one-step thing. (I am very annoyed when I'm asked to fill out my email address on the unsubscribe form since they know it!)

The way it is set up right now, it looks like the point is mostly to reduce the number of emails received. If you report something as spam, you won't see it in your inbox anyway, so the unsubscribe part can only help Google reducing the overall number of emails.

They should just offer this directly. You shouldn't have to first declare it "spam" (which I would feel bad about if it was something I'd signed up for), nor should I have to scrabble about in the small print for a link that might then expect me to log in with a password.

Maybe Google could push for a standard unsubscribe mechanism with the driver being that you're more likely to get falsely accused of being spam if you don't offer people an easy way out.

This depends on the List-Unsubscribe header: http://www.list-unsubscribe.com/

which can be set to an email address or link. If you're adding remove links to your outgoing emails, you might as well put it in the header as well. Hotmail/live mail will only show the link for trusted emails IIRC.

As Gmail has no "feedback loop" that sends spam reports back to the sender, this is better for me (as an email sender) than nothing. People regularly report email as spam that they signed up for and that they just don't care to receive anymore (they even report transactional email as spam, such as an ordery summary/order shipped email).

As a total aside, something I didn't know about until far too recently: hitting 'm' in a Gmail conversation thread mutes it, meaning replies are automatically archived. It doesn't always seem to work, but I find it awfully useful.

Really!? I wonder how often I've done this by accident and never knew figuring the conversation ended.

It only works if you enable keyboard shortcuts. It also shows a yellow alert banner along the top of the screen and provides an "Undo" link.

I probably would've noticed the banner then, thanks.

I love the keyboard shortcuts, just never heard about this one.

This is an excellent little feature.

I do wonder though, that if you send the unsubscribe request via this feature if Google lowers the weight of your spam report. As someone that runs a few mailing lists I know that many users will click the 'spam' button in their email client instead of sending an unsubsribe request. They don't realize it, but if enough people do that on gmail, yahoo or hotmail the mailing list is marked as spam and its almost impossible to get unmarked as spam.

I wonder if this will lead to unsubscribe links containing captchas. Oh the irony...

How can we get an auto-activate script for emails that arrive that require clicking a link to activate a new account somewhere?

I don't get this option in Gmail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com