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Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

This, contrary to what people might believe, is good for online marketing and for business. Here is why:

* You're much better off with a list of people who actually care about your communication and your product, rather than a list of people sort of interested or downright annoyed by you, which haven't unsubscribed because they couldn't find the link.

* Less disinterested subscribers means less costs to send and maintain the list (e.g., via Mailchimp or SES).

* Less spam reports which hurt your email deliverability (get enough of those and you'll be booted off sites like Mailchimp).

* People will have less unwanted commercial communication overall, and will be able to focus on yours (of course I'm talking about the selected group of people who are actually interested).

I welcome this change, and I say this as someone who runs a site that sends 50,000+ 'newsletter' emails per week. This to me is good news.

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Agreed. Much of my consulting work is around email marketing and it always shocks me how many people "can't find" (or don't bother to find) the unsubscribe link and then either reply to the email or mark it as spam.

While this will undoubtedly shrink some email lists, most of those people weren't going to be interested and buy (or whatever the action is) anyway. If you're doing email marketing, you should expect that a certain percentage of people will unsubscribe from any given email not because it's a bad email but they are just no longer interested. Making it more difficult for someone to unsubscribe just increases the likelihood that they'll complain or report it as spam and no one really benefits from that.

They've been trained by unethical spam senders that unsubscribing doesn't work.

Or, the company hides the "unsubscribe" link in a tiny font at the bottom of the email, and it's just much simpler to hit Gmail's big "spam" button at the top.

Is that really considered hiding? I expect the unsubscribe link to be a small link in the footer. If it's not, then it's an inconvenience.

It's small and hard to find.

Yes, that's where I expect to find it, but that involves scrolling down and reading through a bunch of fine print to find the right thing.

Oh, and I've had plenty of cases of using the unsubscribe link not actually work, or only unsubscribe me from one of the five lists that they autosubscribed me to, that it's hard to trust.

On the other hand, the spam button is right up top, in the same place every time, and easy to click. It's a lot faster and more user friendly, and it generally gives me better results.

Let's not forget about the cases where the "unsubscribe" link is really just confirming that a person is receiving the emails so that more can be sent!

No, it's better than that. An advertiser that remails to someone who clicks "unsubscribe" risks prosecution, but he can share his unsubscribe list with a third party in the advertising business, and he can do it legally. This is a loophole in Can-Spam that no one noticed (and not the only one).

Who would want to buy a list of people who unsubscribe? I'm having a hard time imagining a less valuable list of valid email addresses.

> Who would want to buy a list of people who unsubscribe?

A spammer. Before Can-Spam, spammers would always re-use and sell the address of someone who replied to a prior spam mailing, even if the reply was a threat of legal action.

If you're a spammer, there are far easier ways to get lists of email addresses of people who are much more likely to buy something. People who take the time to unsubscribe from a mailing list are incredibly unlikely to buy anything from bona fide spam. Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.

> Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.

Before Can-Spam, spammers ranked e-mail addresses read by a human higher than dead addresses (no surprise). The economics of spamming dictate that a mailing list of living humans, however acquired and however unlikely to result in sales, will be spammed again and again, simply as a bet that some fool somewhere will respond as the spammer would like.

Now that we have Can-Spam and unsubscribe links must be present, the spammers have changed tactics -- instead of collecting reply addresses known to be read by humans, they collect unsubscribe addresses known to be read by humans. Old wine in new bottles.

> are incredibly unlikely to buy anything from bona fide spam.

Yes, but let's say that an unsophisticated computer user receives, not a simple spam message, but a carefully designed phishing e-mail that is known to fool .1% of its recipients. For that scenario, e-mail addresses acquired as explained above would make perfectly suitable targets.

Well now it sounds like you're talking about not just spamming, but phishing.

I can believe that what you're describing has happened before, but it's certainly not endemic. I've never personally seen anything like it.

> Well now it sounds like you're talking about not just spamming, but phishing.

They're interchangeable activities, and both are fueled by a ready supply of e-mail addresses.

Someone who wants a list of verified-to-still-be-in-use email addresses.

I think this is a myth. The unsubscribe link, from everything I've seen since CAN-SPAM a decade ago, almost always works.

> I think this is a myth. The unsubscribe link, from everything I've seen since CAN-SPAM a decade ago, almost always works.

Define "works"? Does clicking "unsubscribe" for advertiser A stop mails from advertiser A? Yes, probably. But what stops advertiser A from sharing his unsubscribe list with advertiser B? Well, nothing -- it's legal and an advantage if advertiser B reciprocates by sharing his list right back.

There's nothing to keep an advertiser from sharing his "unsubscribe" list with any number of other advertisers -- the only legal requirement is that he not mail you again.

A list of people who unsubscribe from mailing lists would be the least valuable list in the world. I can't imagine anyone knowingly paying money for that. What you describe is possible, but I really don't think it's at all common.

You aren't thinking like a spammer. A spammer only cares that the addresses on his list are read by humans. And the possible uses for a list of live human readers isn't limited to spam -- there's also phishing to consider. Someone who recognizes spam and clicks "unsubscribe", after a few days might react differently to an e-mail apparently from Microsoft's security department alerting the user that, since Windows XP is about to drop dead, Microsoft has decided to protect the user with a special security update -- just click the handy link.

Spammers might be deplorable and slimy, but they're not stupid.

> What you describe is possible, but I really don't think it's at all common.

If it can be done, spammers will do it. I can see you're having a hard time thinking like a bottom-feeder, perfectly understandable, so to help your comprehension, I offer the Miracle Man scam:

http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths/#Miracle_Man

It is becoming less common, but quite a few mailers would have that link take you to a website where you either need to login or type something to confirm the unsubscribe.

In those cases I would always just hit the back button and then hit gmail's report as spam button, because fuck that. If any emailer's unsubscribe system is significantly more work for me than reporting as spam, I'm going to report it as spam and not feel the least bit of guilt about it.

The one exception to anything other than an immediate single-click unsubscribe IMO is a confirmation button, prominently displaying the e-mail address that is being unsubscribed, just to deal with the case where someone unsubscribes from a forwarded e-mail.

I would imagine that's exactly the problem gmail is trying to solve with this new button.

(Requiring a password to unsubscribe is not can-spam compliant, by the way)

> I think this is a myth. The unsubscribe link, from everything I've seen since CAN-SPAM a decade ago, almost always works.

The unsubscribe link on "legitimate" marketing emails almost always works. The unsubscribe link on marketing emails that are scams is still used to confirm that the target address is read by a live human and target further scams.

The safe assumption is that any unwanted and unexpected commercial email is, in fact, a scam and treat it as such, as the receiver does not suffer from flagging it as spam.

Obviously, this isn't good for "legitimate" email marketers, but then again, legitimate or not, their emails tend to be a waste of the receivers time and resources, just less actively harmful than the scammers. So, frustrating them as a side effect of an overvigorous defense against scammers is, even if not intended, not something that most users would weigh on the opposite side of the balance from the intended effect.

Almost always works for that particular mail, but verifies that mail is good for whoever that list is then sold on to.

I can only offer my own experience, but I've been involved in email marketing for a while now and I've neither bought nor sold a list of email addresses.

Have you ever closed down one list, but kept the DB of subscriber emails, and then started a new list, months later, that the 'subscriber' would have to unsubscribe from again?

Because that definitely happens.

I've never done that, no. That's not very nice, but it's also bad business. People who unsubscribe have already told you they aren't interested. Email them again and you're far more likely to provoke an angry response than a useful click/open.

I'm happy with this solution.

Prefer an unsubscribe over someone hitting the spam button. If I get too many people marking my mailings as spam, my whole mailing list might be "frozen" until I prove that those people did indeed sign up. Some providers (e.g. Vertical response) even cancel accounts and cancel all existing credits if spam designations exceed 'appropriate' levels.

I always approach people marking my newsletters as spam to explain why this is a problem. If they respond, most do, I use their response (eg 'I left the area') as proof to the provider that they simply meant to unsubscribe...

Yup, the only reason google is able to offer one click unsubscribe is because the people sending the message have enabled the list-unsubscribe header. They are intentionally making it easy to unsubscribe. No legitimate email marketer wants to send messages to someone who doesn't want them.

If this is good for them, than why no marketing email feature a prominent unsubscribe button at the top of the email? Surely it's not an original idea by Google.

If you use something like MailChimp (I think that's what many new businesses tend to use? I can't remember..) or one with pretty subscribe/unsubscribe page for every customer who uses the mailing list service, then the customer's customers will have the luck to enjoy opt-in/opt-out option. If your organization is still running some out-of-date, custom subscription software, then unsubscribe might be out of the question.

Greed, mostly. And stupid short-term thinking of the "I don't care if it benefits everyone else, it doesn't benefit me now" type.

Turns out most people are dumb and self-absorbed.

Yes, I completely agree!

I tried to do an email campaign about a year ago and it was a nightmare to get good quality subscribers.

I would much rather have 1,000 people who really care about my newsletter than 100,000 that don't.

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