I want a "plonk" button in Gmail

http://workin-progress.posterous.com/37049855

by kolinko • 16 years ago

39 38 16 years ago

workin-progress.posterous.com

JoachimSchipper• 16 years ago

Obviously, unsubscribing is more polite.

That said, maybe GMail and friends could add a button based on a List-unsubscribe header?

judofyr• 16 years ago

If you mark a message as spam and there's a Unsubscribe header, Gmail asks you if you want to unsubscribe from the mailing list itself.

larrik• 16 years ago

Marking a newsletter you signed up for as "spam" seems pretty harsh.

kolinko6• 16 years ago

oh, I didn't know about this header... now I'm even more surprised by a lack of "plonk" feature.

idive3• 16 years ago

That seems like a good idea, until you plonk your US Airways newsletter and realize that you've plonked future flight confirmations as well.

kolinko6• 16 years ago

it's still in the archive and usually newsletters are sent from a different mails than newsletters.

there could be also some other mechanisms (filtering titles?) - come on, I'm sure there are solutions that won't require me to get through four separate screens and interrupt my workflow!

xyzzyb• 16 years ago

Is it really a regular part of your workflow? How often are you unsubscribing from lists?

Maybe just archive them when you are in the middle of workflow, then have a weekly time when you work up filtering for the non-spam unwanted email you got that week.

The priority inbox feature seems like it was made for you as well.

msluyter• 16 years ago

Yes, this is precisely what I thought. I have a gmail label, "bacon," for such cases. I filter bacon by applying the label and then skipping the inbox (archiving). So, for example, my Priceline junk mail doesn't appear in my inbox, but it's not lost if I ever do make a priceline request.

lukeschlather2• 16 years ago

I call it marketing, but it would be nice if there were a way to add an address to the filter with a single click.

zoomzoom• 16 years ago

That is why marketing and sales should have separate communication channels.

kscaldef• 16 years ago

From the point of view of the company sending the email, this is why marketing and sales _shouldn't_ have separate channels.

zalew• 16 years ago

I am surprised that there are people that actually unsubscribe from newsletters. I never to that. Instead I filter out the sender from my Gmail

ummm, why surprised? why have your email in a database you don't want to use, or why have it send emails you won't read anyway? I think unsubscribing is fair for both sides.

kolinko6• 16 years ago

it takes time to unsubscribe, sometimes it's not that easy and sometimes "unsubscribe" is not respected (or mysterious "server error prevents me from unsubscribing) - of course that's not the case of yahoo groups or google groups, but there are quite a few companies that do that.

camiller• 16 years ago

Most of the time when I unsubscribe it is easy and respected by the sender. When it is not I resort to the gmail filters as a backup.

grantheaslip2• 16 years ago

The vast majority of the time it's a one or two click process. A few sites require you to log in to change your email preferences, but they're few and far between.

The one exception I can think of off the top of my head is MTV Networks, who got a hold of my email somehow and won't stop spamming me, even after I've unsubscribed at least a dozen times.

PedroCandeias• 16 years ago

Don't see the point. Unsubscribing is generally faster than going through the motions of setting up a filter. It's also much more polite. I reserve filters or "mark as spam" for only the stuff with a missing or malfunctioning unsubscription option.

kolinko6• 16 years ago

Well - that is the point! The filter should be faster than the "Unsubscribe"! :)

grantheaslip2• 16 years ago

I'm not convinced this is a real problem though. I don't think I've ever thought to myself "man, hitting this unsubscribe link is so annoying, I wish there was a better way!". Plus, why keep all of these emails in a label when you can just opt-out of them at the source?

nhangen• 16 years ago

I think that if I'm taking the time to sign up for a newsletter and add to the costs of hosting that email account, then unsubscribing when I no longer need it is the right thing to do. I also find it to be the easiest thing to do.

In the few cases where I unsub and still get emails, I'd prefer the "Report as Spam" button would just block that sender's address in the future.

ditojim• 16 years ago

gmail actually will attempt to unsubscribe you automatically when you mark a newsletter as spam, sometimes.

screenshot: http://imgur.com/HqbVm

so it seems they are trying to solve this problem in a more complete way then filtering the mail thru personal mail filters.

narag• 16 years ago

A couple of companies regularly sent me spam disguised as a newsletter. I'm completely sure I didn't subscribe to anything from them. Their unsubscribe systems and polite requests didn't work. The worst was that GMail didn't learn to mark them as spam.

I found a nice GMail feature: I could create a filter that killed their spam from my inbox and then sent a copy of the message to the addresses that I chose, that were the abuse, postmaster, etc. that previously had ignored me. I also added addresses from DNS database and the staff of the spammers.

Unfortunately this feature seems to be disabled for some time now. The filters I created are still there, but I can't create more of their kind.

bkhl• 16 years ago

Windows Live Hotmail already does a similar thing with its new Sweep feature.

kolinko6• 16 years ago

cool! :)

I want a "plonk" button in Gmail

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