No one-click unsubscribe? It's spam.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4929997

by cpursley • 14 years ago

161 108 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Your marking emails might not have a one-click unsubscribe link but Gmail certainly has a one click spam button.

Two ways you can keep me as a subscriber:

1. Remind me what the hell it is your company does/sells in the first sentence. Between my signup and now, chances are about 95% that I forgot what I even signed up for.

2. Make it easy to unsubscribe. That means a very visible one-click link. Unsubscribing doesn't mean I'm no longer interested in your product. But making it difficult to unsubscribe says a lot about how I will be treated as your customer.

<extra> Go easy on the HTML / CSS / Images. </credit>

massarog• 14 years ago

Companies that make me sign in to unsubscribe, stop doing this.

rocky1138• 14 years ago

If I click an unsubscribe link and the company wants me to sign in, I mark it as spam in gmail.

sorenbs• 14 years ago

It's amazing how many US based startups does this.

jrockway• 14 years ago

If I didn't explicitly opt in (checking an unchecked checkbox, emailing someone and saying "please subscribe me to your ads", etc.), I mark it as spam.

csixty4• 14 years ago

One of the ACM's email lists makes you log in to unsubscribe, but then I can't access that section of the site because my membership lapsed.

And this organization purports to represent the state of the art in this field.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

I'd like to add:

3. I shouldn't have to sign in to unsubscribe.

4. Don't auto-subscribe me to new notification types. (We're ALL looking at YOU LinkedIn.)

_delirium• 14 years ago

Twitter has been doing #4 aggressively as well, which is a bit disappointing, since somehow I assumed they were better about netiquette than LinkedIn is.

nwh• 14 years ago

Twitter is horrible at that. Every few weeks they add a new notification type that you have to unsubscribe from, lest you get hit with another "newsletter" every few hours.

spenvo• 14 years ago

Linked-In has the spammiest email protocol out of any service I have ever used. Even after signing-in there is no one-click-to-unsubscribe button (they split it into about 12 scattered categories), and they create new categories periodically and opt you in to them. This is downright deceitful. Pro tip: change your email to one that you never use. It literally came down to doing this or deleting my Linked-in account--unfathomable to me. Also: no more f@#$!ng emails at 4 in the morning. This seems like a jackpot CAN-SPAM class action suit.

@easternmonk: That's the thing -- I did mark them as spam in GMail. I assumed it would block future emails from Linked-in but not the case. ... Somehow they continued to come in.

@sehugg: That too! I complained about their this on Facebook and I had friends (yes, plural) who had deleted their account because of the spam and yet were still receiving it. Unbelievable

3amOpsGuy• 14 years ago

change your email address with them to myoriginalusername+linkedin@whatever.com

Filter with gay abandon.

toomuchtodo• 14 years ago

Came to leave this comment, not disappointed someone beat me to it.

cpursley3• 14 years ago

Agreed, spenvo! First thing I do when I sign up for a LI group is unsubscribe from all mailings (excepting a few which I chose to follow on a daily/weekly basis).

The next page after signing up for a LI group should be (unchecked) opt-in checkboxes for the mailings you'd like to receive.

easternmonk• 14 years ago

Just mark it as spam in Gmail.

geogaddi• 14 years ago

I agree completely with your description, of all the social services I have an account with, I find them to be the worst offender of emails and reminders.

sehugg• 14 years ago

Not only that, but they send you emails even after you have deleted your account.

iloveponies• 14 years ago

They repeatedly send you emails even if you don't have an account.

arbuge• 14 years ago

If you really want to kill ALL Linkedin messages choose the "Filter messages like these" option in Gmail. Then just enter "linkedin.com" in the From field. Done.

arikrak• 14 years ago

You can also create filters to manage such emails so it doesn't clutter you're inbox, but still lets you see them if you want.

JEVLON• 14 years ago

I did this with a college newsletter that was spammy, and had no method to unsubscribe. After repeatedly marking the email as spam to no avail, I set a filter up to send the message to the bin.

dpearson• 14 years ago

Twitter, too, has twelve categories of email to opt yourself out of, although I don't believe that you're not automatically opted in to all of them (I unsubscribed long ago, so I can't be sure).

sp332• 14 years ago

Some woman who was in my grandfather's contact list got spammed by LinkedIn for a month. There didn't seem to be any way to unsubscribe. She ended up hating my grandfather, because his name kept showing up on the emails! Of course he didn't know there wasn't going to be an opt-out. I ended up adding her email address to my LinkedIn account, so they would stop spamming her.

gknoy• 14 years ago

Change the email you use there to yourname+linkedin@gmail.com, and then filter it out. :)

thoughtcriminal• 14 years ago

I flag all LinkedIn email as spam, and yet I still find the occasional LinkedIn email in my inbox. You could call it Superspam!

drx• 14 years ago

I agree.

The other day I had to unsubscribe out of two Yahoo! Japan newsletters that suddenly started to arrive (for two different accounts I've apparently made years before).

To unsubscribe I had to login to both. And for one I didn't even remember the password. Overall it took me half an hour to unsubscribe.

Also if I can't unsubscribe it goes to spam.

delackner2• 14 years ago

Japan tangent: I am amazed on a weekly basis by the mountain of spam newsletters flooding my email inbox by some of Japan's leading internet services. Total lack of respect for the customer. Physical mail today is pretty much 99% spam and 1% bills, and it looks like it might take a miracle to stop email ending up the same way.

lt• 14 years ago

It's in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act

    You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...

staunch• 14 years ago

I would not interpret "visiting a single page" to mean one-click. Of course, I agree that one-click is the right way to do things.

27182818284• 14 years ago

It is the spirit if not the letter of the law. Nobody intended someone to use 50 AJAX steps on a single page to skirt the law.

rvkennedy• 14 years ago

I think "visiting a single page" means precisely one-click.

Because once click takes you to the page. Any further action, even while you're on that same page, is an additional requirement, which is disallowed.

larrys• 14 years ago

You can find practically nothing, except for some initial cases many years ago, where someone has been prosecuted for can-spam. I would imagine that like with any crime, you would have to really piss some people off to fall under this act.

(Smoking marijuana is a crime as well as is driving over the speed limit and a host of other things that generally don't land you in hot water even if they are known to the authorities.)

mikle2• 14 years ago

I love that, but unfortunately CAN-SPAM is a US law, not a universal law.

eli7• 14 years ago

Sure, but it applies to the many, many US-based tech companies. And I know Canada, Australia, and the UK have similar laws.

xur17• 14 years ago

So, that means I shouldn't have to login to my account to unsubscribe, correct? I find this annoying as I tend to click on the unsubscribe link from my phone, and not have the login details with me. I've seen several prominent companies that do this, including Mint earlier today.

dhimes• 14 years ago

You are correct.

joonix• 14 years ago

Yes that is not permitted - they need to use encoded links in the email to identify you automatically upon click.

JacobAldridge• 14 years ago

Also a good reason to test your emails in different systems - Gmail often snips emails I receive, meaning the Unsubscribe link at the bottom is cut off. I'll bet that leads to increased spam reports.

Aweber had an article last week suggesting you put an Unsub link at the top of your emails as well. I haven't had the guts to do that for my template (EveryDayDreamHoliday) but as a consumer I like the idea.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

> Gmail often snips emails I receive, meaning the Unsubscribe link at the bottom is cut off.

It also makes these emails 100% unreadable on a mobile device, because they don't include the link to the full message on phones for some reason, even though they do on their web interface.

natmaster3• 14 years ago

I have one-click no-login unsubscribe button at the bottom of all my emails. To even get an email you have to explicitly subscribe to something. (This is not a mailing list but notification system.) Yet I still get about 1 spam report a day.

I am tempted to just deactivate anyone's account that reports as spam. Is there something else I'm missing?

Shank• 14 years ago

You might send an email along the lines of "continue receiving these?" every few months and offer an unsubscribe email in there, but that's all I can think of. I'd imagine that's a fairly low spam report threshold as it is.

dennisgorelik• 14 years ago

1 spam report per how many sent emails?

natmaster3• 14 years ago

3000

DanBC• 14 years ago

I'd be interested in what the current best practice is for sending emails.

For your case, do the emails start with an idiot proof line such as "This is the notification that you signed up for at example.com" ?

natmaster3• 14 years ago

From is the username they subscribed to. Subject has the website url along with the the exact type of notification it is.

Content is very short and sweet.

fleitz• 14 years ago

Having run a mailing list I can pretty much tell you that despite your best efforts to put the right headers in so Google can do their own unsub links, unsub at top and bottom, etc, that despite all this and being fully CAN-SPAM complaint that people will still write emails to your ISP claiming that your sending SPAM.

I'm not sure why but usually it's academics who send these. Maybe people sign them up for mailing lists b/c they are jerks or something. They all seem to be sure that they've never ever signed up for a mailing list.

ISP sends me email about the compliance issue, I put the email address into a form that blocks it from ever being associated with any of the lists on that server, and it spits back an email detailing when they signed up, confirmed, etc, that they've been blacklisted, and then attaches a jpeg image of the headers / footers with unsub links circled in red so the ISP can close the case.

graue2• 14 years ago

> Maybe people sign them up for mailing lists b/c they are jerks or something

Not possible if you have a confirm step. And you should have a confirm step.

polyfractal2• 14 years ago

You would be surprised. I've run several mailing lists for both technical and non-technical people.

Always, without fail, you will get someone that signs up, confirms and then mashes the spam button two emails later while sending you irate "HOW DID YOU GET MY EMAIL ADDRESS UNSUBSCRIBE ME OHGODWHATHAVEYOUDONE?!" emails.

It's remarkable, really.

dbz• 14 years ago

Tangentially related: you can create a filter to search for emails with the word "unsubscribe" in them. Generally speaking I don't want to read anything with "unsubscribe" in it, and when I do, I have a nice folder for it.

slig• 14 years ago

My Gmail won't block linkedin spam no mater how much I click on "report spam".

zecho• 14 years ago

Create a filter for linkedin and send it to your spam folder.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

Better yet, create a filter for linkedin and have the filter first forward the mail to abuse@linkedin.com with a header explaining why and then throw it in the trash.

lucb1e• 14 years ago

Anyone who doesn't offer a one-click-unsubscribe gets in my blocklist. This means that to every newsletter you send, you get an automatic response that I didn't care enough. I don't even see you sent the message at all.

It's too bad that they're usually sent from no-reply, yes, but it's more satisfactory at least.

zalzane• 14 years ago

Ironically enough I have more issues with getting spam text messages on my cell phone than spam email messages. It's a shame that either the CAN-SPAM act isn't enforced or doesn't apply to text messages. I'm on the national do not call list as well, and that has had seemingly no affect.

Ironlink• 14 years ago

As a developer, I like to follow the rule of thumb that requests that have a persistent effect (such as changing your subscription options) should be HTTP POST rather than HTTP GET. This is in order to avoid mistakes generated by automated tools or systems which pre-fetch/cache/scan/analyze content. As such, my unsubscribe links lead to a page containing a one sentence summary of what you are about to do, and a form submit button.

This does not apply to the link passed in the SMTP header List-Unsubscribe, which needs to take direct action.

46Bit• 14 years ago

It's slightly less fast, but I don't mind this. Provided you don't make me remember which email address you're sending to and just autofill it, I'll happily click all the one-button forms you like.

eof• 14 years ago

posted 691 days ago: but i said two clicks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2139617

clay• 14 years ago

Dropbox did this recently with an email titled "Never email big files again! Share with a Dropbox link"

xpose2000• 14 years ago

Bonus Points: If I haven't logged into your site in over 2 weeks and/or opened an email, consider me unsubscribed and stop sending me emails.

eli7• 14 years ago

Two weeks is ridiculous. You might as well not send a newsletter. Depending on your service, pretty much everyone on your list will, at one point or another, go two weeks without a trackable interaction.

I've personally seen (opt-in) newsletter subscribers go many months without loading images or clicking a link... but send them a notice that their subscription is being turned off as a courtesy and sure enough a sizable percentage click the "keep me subscribed" button.

PeterisP• 14 years ago

How would you know if I've opened your e-mail? Active html in emails (which would allow image-bugs to work) is disabled for most people that I know.

greggman• 14 years ago

My pet peeve, companies that don't unsubscribe immediately. Apple for example says they'll unsubscribe you in 10 days. Given all the other things a company's systems can do immediately this one strikes me as spammy

eli7• 14 years ago

Many companies say 10 days as a legal CYA (10 days is the limit imposed by CAN-SPAM Act). In practice, despite what they say, it's usually instant.

michaelbuddy2• 14 years ago

not 10 consecutive days of course. just 10 random days in the future of our choosing.

X-Istence4• 14 years ago

The companies where I have noticed this it is mainly because they send so much email that the email might already be sitting in the outgoing queue waiting to be delivered...

readme• 14 years ago

e-how's unsubscribe link doesn't work. i've been getting spam from them for a while now, just because I wanted to post some backlinks on their articles :)

jonathanmarcus• 14 years ago

Meetup.com and as a result the New York Tech Meetup are egregious offenders of not providing 1-click unsubscribe. They take it another step further and make it extremely difficult to unsubscribe on the website too.

michaelt• 14 years ago

Meetup.com also send out "A waitlist is available for [event]" e-mails - perhaps the most unhelpful e-mail possible, and as far as I can tell the only way to turn them off is to turn off everything.

Makes me thankful for gmail's filtering.

SIULHT• 14 years ago

But aren't the mails which contain one-click unsubscribe links also spam because they use it to identify which email accounts are active and sell that information to other marketers?

binarymax• 14 years ago

This happened to me with TripIt. A colleague invited me and they started sending me spam without any action from myself, and it was to my corporate account without an easy spam button like yahoo mail or gmail. I couldn't unsubscribe without creating an account first. I ended up emailing their corporate address notifying them they were violating CAN-SPAM and they manually removed me, and a PR contact apologised. I advised them they should give non-users a way to unsubscribe. I'm not sure if they ended up following my advice. My colleagues are loyal users, but just because your users love you doesn't mean your non-users want your email.

cpursley3• 14 years ago

TripIt is one of the offenders for certain. The network updates are obnoxious.

leoh• 14 years ago

Tell that to the New England Journal of Medicine, please. I have unsuccessfully tried to unsubscribe from them several times and they do not use this simple pattern.

ahelwer• 14 years ago

The ACM is also really horrible. Subscription options are located in two or three hard-to-find places on the website. They kept on sending me emails somehow, and I eventually had to file a support ticket to get my account deleted.

el_cuadrado• 14 years ago

FYI: most SPAM feedback systems reduce your account weight ('trust score') if you tag your non-SPAM emails as SPAM.

Although I agree with one-click-unsubscribe sentiment, clicking SPAM on an e-mail you subscribed for is not very productive.

Matsta• 14 years ago

I found it was actually easier to edit my profile then unsubscribe from SPAM crap I get from Linked in. So I changed my profile to reflect this but I still get spam everyday :(

http://nz.linkedin.com/pub/matt-gascoigne/17/a25/9b6

jordoh• 14 years ago

Even if you make it easy to unsubscribe (one click, no sign-in, prominent link), sending an email to any large number of people will still result in "mark as spam" being used on a surprisingly large percent of messages.

Where I work, we send mail through Amazon SES, so we get digests of all the messages that have been marked as spam (stripped of identifying email headers). We see it used on (marketing) newsletters of course, but also on welcome messages; transactional messages (both the "action required to receive money" and "you owe us money" type, though the latter get marked as spam much more frequently); password reset messages; and pretty much anything else we've sent out more than some middling-to-large number of times.

To help deal with this, we include a token in each message and process the digests so marking a message as spam will unsubscribe you (or disable the notification). It's not ideal from our point of view - because we are presumably getting dinged by the mail provider when someone marks a message as spam - but hopefully it helps in the long run since we don't send more messages that will likely just get marked as spam.

When I mark something as spam, I'm doing it to penalize the sender. Whether they made it hard for me to unsubscribe, bought my email from someone else to spam me (hooray for "+blah" gmail aliases), or whatever else - I see it as a different action than unsubscribing. I'm not sure, however, that this difference is commonly perceived. It seems like there are a lot of people out there that use it much less judiciously.

Occasionally I will mark a message as spam in Gmail and get a dialog asking if I want to unsubscribe instead of mark as spam; though I only recall this happening with messages from Google properties. It would be nice (though possibly ripe for abuse) if there was some way to let Gmail know where the unsubscribe link is in the message, so third parties could take advantage of this feature. That way the user could be a little clearer about whether they are punishing the sender, or just want the message to go away.

polyfractal2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you are correct. Most people don't realize that mashing the spam button not only moves the message to the Spam label, but also alerts the ISP and ESP which causes negative repercussions for everyone.

I'm fine with people hitting spam because something is legitimately spam. But hitting it because you are too lazy to click the Unsubscribe link is crappy. Or, more likely, because everyone thinks it's the same as the unsubscribe link.

I'll only spam something if A) there is no unsubscribe link or B) I keep getting emails after I unsubscribe.

Cherian_Abraham• 14 years ago

Udemy is one of the spammiest services I have ever come across. Despite, hitting unsubscribe and going through the motions over 10 times, emailing them half a dozen times and finally deleting my account - I still get spammed.

Udemy is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Spam for me.

X-Istence4• 14 years ago

That's an issue i've been having with NaNoWriMo, I unsubscribed and yet I continue to receive emails. Now I have simply marked them as spam.

aroberge• 14 years ago

Disqus has started spamming me. I signed up to it using my Google account. When it spams, it says that I can turn off notifications ... But, guess what: you can't sign in with your Google account credentials. So, I can't change the notification, and there's no way to unsubscribe when getting email.

cpursley3• 14 years ago

Err. marketing not marking.

3. Check for spelling and grammar...

stephen_g• 14 years ago

One other thing that massively annoys me - one of my email accounts is a gmail account with a fairly generic username, and people are constantly using it to sign up for things - and I'm getting some that have no way to unsubscribe (like BestBuy trying to get me to activate the antivirus subscription I never bought, or asking me to renew - I don't even live in the same country).

So, if you're sending emails, please, please, put a 'I didn't sign up for this account' so I don't have to try and go to the site and reset their passwords and try to get the account deactivated.

Please just have a link to immediately disassociate my email (like Gmail does).

learn• 14 years ago

This happens to me all the time as well. As a "quick to anger" person this is the WORST thing you can do (un)intentionally!

BrianEatWorld• 14 years ago

I got stuck with marketing emails for my start-up and I take a bit of an issue with point one.

How is it the sender's fault if you can't remember why you signed up for an email?

As a matter of best practices, I do remind subscribers. However, it is also quite irritating to be marked as spam, when it was the user who signed up for my messages. By all means unsubscribe, but marking me as spam, especially because I use the highly spam averse Mailchimp is a mean thing to do. Its particularly mean if its just because you forgot what you signed up for.

delackner2• 14 years ago

Just because your boss asked you to do something that many people HATE, doesn't make it better.

People handing over their email address in exchange for user registration or to gain access to a trial version of your product are not interested in receiving sporadic advertising for the next N years.

People are inundated by unwanted email every day, from companies that claim, like Dracula, "but you said I could come inside." Some people don't mind, but some of your target customers will already have very negative reactions to ANY marketing email, so it is incredibly important that you go out of your way to make it clear that you are trying to communicate something that will benefit the recipient, not just a sales pitch you can justify legally sending them.

xenophonf• 14 years ago

This. I'm so sick of receiving marketing emails from companies to whom I sent a one-time informational query, not to mention the marketing emails sent to addresses gleaned from public directories like Jigsaw (of which I am _not_ a member).

X-Istence4• 14 years ago

Not sure about others on HN, but for example when I come across an interesting project on HN that has a sign-up page to be reminded when they open I will sign up. I generally won't receive messages for X amount of weeks, and out of the blue I'll get an email. In that email let me know who you are, and what made you interesting enough for me to most likely sign up for your mailing list.

darec1• 14 years ago

Ah, if you can unsubscribe with one click, maybe even without logging in. What stops evil Bert over there from unsubscribing you? Sure, there might be some (session) token involved, but that could have been sniffed or brute-forced.

Actually mailing lists do it right, have the subscriber confirm his action by clicking a link in a confirmation mail or such. I think that's called double confirmation.

X-Istence4• 14 years ago

Generally when I unsubscribe from a newsletter they send me a message saying they are sorry to see me go, with a 1 click link to subscribe again ...

Spoom• 14 years ago

If "evil Bert" has access to my inbox, the jig is up anyway.

abrown28• 14 years ago

How do you implement one-click when your customers forward your emails around and anybody could click on unsubscribe?

mathewparet• 14 years ago

1) No email address to be shared beyond a domain. (I can see that some sites partner together and if I register for some newsletter on one site, another site (domain) should not add me in their list, even if both the sites are run by the same company. 2) Email address to which emails are subscribed 3) A single click opt-out 4) Instant Opt-out (many sites say will opt out in XX hours and finally I forget that I unsubscribe, and again I try to unsubscribe.

hendry• 14 years ago

I wrote a announce list manager over here https://github.com/kaihendry/sg-hackandtell/blob/master/list... that's inspired by this. Be great to get a code review.

tom314• 14 years ago

The whole point is, if you make it harder to unsubscribe, people will mark you as spam, think you're even more annoying than other not-wanted mailings and even more unlikely to do business with. Compare it with a store attendee who pulls you in and doesn't let you out anymore.. You will NEVER shop there anymore even if they have stuff you like.

No one-click unsubscribe? It's spam.

Related Stories