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>>> please please please take the time to locate the very clearly marked unsubscribe link

You mean the one word link in font 6 hidden maybe somewhere at the bottom of the email if it's there at all?

I have never seen an easy clearly marked unsubscribe in my life.

When at look at my friends and parents who are not as computer savvy and often don't see things put in front of them, there is no way they would ever manage to unsubscribe from any newsletter. The spam button is a godsend.

What's worse is when the unsubscribe link takes you to a page where you can select the reason why you are unsubscribing, and it doesn't include an option like "I never signed up to this mailing list". I've never in my life checked the box to sign up to any mailing list, so this is always my reason, yet some arrogant marketers believe they always obtain consent when they add emails to their mailing lists and so remove this option.

The even worse scenario is when the unsubscribe workflow is hidden behind a login screen. Unsubscribing from a mailing list should be one of two clicks at most.

Especially when you don’t even have an account. I’ve had to create an account just to unsubscribe before.

> when the unsubscribe link takes you to a page where you can select the reason why you are unsubscribing

It should only take one click on the unsubscribe link in the email for the sender to actually do the unsubscribe. If after processing it the sender is determined to try and stuff a sales and marketing survey on the landing page, I suppose it's hard to stop them, but I won't play "20 questions" just to get the sender to accept that I don't want any more of their emails.

Executive summary: if I can't unsubscribe from your email newsletter with one click, you get the spam filter treatment <sigh>

> I have never seen an easy clearly marked unsubscribe in my life.

Just a few easy to find unsub links from emails on the first page of RGE.

https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/stay-cool-during-summer-... https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/find-your-perfect-fit https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/download-the-new-sonos-a... https://reallygoodemails.com/emails/dad-approved

Not including the list-unsubscribe headers all these will have which are trivial to click in most modern email clients.

Spend 20 seconds on the page, couldn't see an unsubscribe button.

Tried to spend another 20 seconds in good faith, still couldn't find it. I honestly don't understand what is the strange layouts of these pages and where is the newsletter even supposed to be.

Spam that is.

P.S. If you're wondering, the news seems to be the left column, then go to the bottom. I don't think having to scroll through 3 screens of texts and pictures to find a button is easy. My not tech savvy parents and friends wouldn't be able to find it.

Mine are 100% clear, look like a link, and aren’t hidden.

Punish those who abuse it, not everyone. That’s all I’m saying.

3. This is not an ad hominem, and I'm sure you're part of the 1%, but 99% of newsletters I receive are spam that I never wanted in the first place.

Companies employ a tremendous range of dark patterns to get my consent for email, then flood me with spam. Time after time I have unsubscribed from the "best products of the week"-newsletter, just to receive a "weekly product highlights"-newsletter the next day. According to the logic of the sending company, this is a completely different newsletter that I also have to unsubscribe from.

I mark all of them as spam. I'm sorry the 99% make life more challenging for you.

Don't be sorry. If you receive something you don't want to receive, that is the definition of spam.

Wiktionary ‘defines’ spam as ‘unsolicited and unwanted’.

Elsewhere, Wikipedia describes spam as ‘unsolicited or unwanted’.

And vs. Or. Of course spam’s definition should use ‘and’.

When you sign up for a newsletter, and later decide you don’t want it, to call it ‘spam’ is merely metaphorical.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spam

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam

Nah. You forgot to quote the key word from those definitions: email. Not "newsletters subscriptions", not "promises to receive interesting emails", not "agreements to get sent x mails per week". Spam is unsolicited and/or unwanted email, period.

It does not matter whether you were tricked into subscribing to some newsletter or whether you checked a "receive interesting emails from us" box while paying for something.

If the email you just received is unsolicited and/or unwanted, then it's spam by definition.

"Unwanted" is hard to define in a way not to include many things. When an acquaintance or relative sends me some bullshit meme or a silly joke, that's an unwanted email. It's not spam though.

That's why there usually needs to be some direct or indirect commercial gain involved too.

The legacy definition of spam is any unwanted email, or "unsolicited commercial email"

But in the context of social media, what does spam mean? It isn't email. And an awful lot of it is simply self-promotion or commercial promotion.

And many FB groups and the like are permissive when it comes to posts that are really advertisements, or are just one person's definition of "off topic." And there are mechanisms for reporting content as "spam", but what does that even mean when it isn't an email?

I've found that many people have redefined the term "spam" as repetitive content, not unwanted/unsolicited content. I guess this comes from gamer/chat culture where there is talk of "spamming the jump button" or "spamming the chat" where it isn't the content that is remarkable, it is the repetition. You can kind of see where it comes from as most email spammers are quite repetitive and indiscriminate. But a spam email can be just one, and that definition doesn't seem to fly in the inherently noisy social media context.

I was just struck by this evolution of the term spam when I tried reporting some (unwanted by me) commercial self-promotion on social media, only to be told that it wasn't spam at all because the poster only posted it once. I guess a lot of it comes down to how territorial and defensive people are about their email inbox vs. social media feed.

I take exception with the ‘and/or’—-what prevents you from choosing precise language?

The impact of you clicking spam is exponentially worse than you expect.

I said please three times because laziness on your part is really really bad for us who do it right.

> 1. If you subscribe to a list then please please please take the time to locate the very clearly marked unsubscribe link, or use the one that gmail or your other email client shows.

Teaching people to click unsubscribe links in spam emails is horrible security practice. I know you said “if you subscribed to a list” but it’s hard for me to verify that the sender of the email is the original company I subscribed to.

I don’t understand this argument at all.

You mean to say you signed up for a service or subscribed to a newsletter, then see an email from the service or newsletter and don’t know if it’s really that company/person?

Did you check the “to”? Do you look at the url of the unsubscribe link? (Harder when click tracking is on, I know)

And you would rather hurt that company or person because you don’t feel like taking the time?

This makes no sense to me, and I hope I’m not in the minority here.

I think he means that a lot of pure-spam emails include an unsubscribe link that actually proves to the spammer that they've reached a live person, and then they'll resell your address to everyone.

It can be difficult to tell if it's a fake UniversalBankCo email or a real one, even if you are a UniversalBankCo customer.

No, if you send an unwanted email people have no obligation to ensure your company preserves a good spam rating, and are free to do whatever they want to do with your email.

The good news is that if you improve your process and send less unwanted emails, they'll be less flagged as spam and you'll keep a good spam rating. The system works basically.

Buuut, it doesn’t.

The system that you’re talking about is heavily weighted towards sending more stuff to spam than not.

Keeping a good spam rating is an extreme challenge for legit senders, especially when so many people click the spam button for reasons that have to do with laziness and carelessness.

Lasiness and carelessness? If people click the spam button, you are sending them content they find annoying, end of story. No need to bring personal defaults into that, your service is not entitled to their attention.

I'm on several mailing lists from US companies that use Cloudflare country filters or similar technologies to block non-US traffic to their sites. So since moving out of the US I have no way of unsubscribing and no way of contacting them, so they all get reported as spam.

Keep this in mind if you run a list and are ever tempted to mass block traffic from your site.

Interesting!

We don’t do any of that, but that’s also something I’ve never thought about.

Can’t you email them?

I tried the generic contacts and got no response. Filed an FTC complaint for whatever good that did, then blocked and moved on.

The problem is the one of scale and time waste: you are asking recipients to decide whether your email is mass-spam, commercial unsolicited email (also spam), something they subscribed to using a dark pattern (prechecked checkbox), something they subscribed to on purpose (and how long ago). To top it all off, some use those unsubscribe links or embedded images to track and confirm how real a recipient is. And many an unsubscribe link is simply broken.

You have to accept the reality that in very few cases people want these emails, so you are asking them to expend the effort in deciphering origin, purpose and viability of unsubscribing for the few where it will work.

If you are in the legitimate email business, you should design around this reality.

Sad, but not untrue.

I appreciate the pragmatism here!

Do you know of any articles or useful content around this?

So, I should navigate to an external webpage (which can include other forms of tracking) to unsubscribe from an email that was unsolicited? Personally, I'd rather just flag it as junk/spam.

"if you subscribe to a list" makes it pretty clear that it was not unsolicited.

If you're receiving unsolicited marketing emails, that is the literal definition of spam.

Again, I’m talking about something you signed up for/subscribed to.

Random emails are... random.

I'm kind of sympathetic to your plight, at least until I get here:

> Now, if you can’t unsubscribe (because there’s no link, it’s broken, or simply doesn’t actually unsubscribe), and this is a legit company, please please please let them know.

No chance I'm taking the time to do that. 99.99% they already know that it's broken and either made it that way intentionally or intentionally refuse to fix it to boost some kind of performance metrics. Why take the time to contact them? To the spam-filter it rightly goes.

Unsolicited, commercial email is spam.

Divorce yourself from this notion that it's sometimes okay to send it. It's not just a newsletter. It don't care that you now offer free delivery. If the recipient didn't explicitly ask you for marketing communications, you're just as bad as the people offering penis enlargement pills. That's why you get treated the same.

If it is something I asked for, I will click the unsubscribe link.

I would say maybe .001% (or less) of spam mail is mail I want and purposefully requested.

I have a fundamental issue with "Unsubscribe". In most cases I want to be removed from their registry/"right to be forgotten".

"Unsubscribe" is a smokescreen for the above purpose. Most people believe that "Unsubscribe" makes these companies go away, but in reality it just hides the fact that they still own some of your data. And if it is companies like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, they tend to follow you around the web, even if you haven't logged on to their service at the time (this has been discussed plenty).

I am in EU, so GDPR applies. I prefer to (instead) take a few mins and either respond and/or respond and include their "privacy@example.com" asking them as per GDPR to delete me from their records, which they (most) claim to have done so.

In some extreme cases, I filter to auto-delete their crap. I understand the grandfather of this post claiming that we should make the effort to do things clean and neat (which I honestly do and urge friends and family to also do), but there is an imbalance here. Some companies act in a very unethical way. They take the (beneficial to them) gamble that most people will prefer to flag as spam, than go through the multiple hoops of "Unsubscribing". The fact that he/she acts ethically, caring for the marketing effectiveness of his/her efforts makes him the minority (imho).

I don't hate advertisements or advertisers. They are people too. I just dislike the practices of the majority of marketers.

> I have a fundamental issue with "Unsubscribe". In most cases I want to be removed from their registry/"right to be forgotten".

Right, but that's not an unsubscribe issue. You're not trying to unsubscribe from someone's mailing list, you're trying to be removed entirely from their database. They're entirely separate things.

The most annoying thing for me is when my users flag a transactional email as spam (I don’t send marketing). What you don’t want your text only receipt?!

So I reached out to a few of my users to figure out why they were flagging their receipt as spam... turns out they don’t differentiate between the “spam” button and the “delete” button. So really they just didn’t care to have their receipt (perfectly legit) and are clicking whatever button removes it.

The button could say “Launch Nukes” and if removes the message from their immediate view they’ll push it.

I get where you're coming from, but I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. Outside of these mailing lists I never even subscribed to but magically got added to on signing up or what not, I don't receive any spam. Spam in the way it used to be is not a problem today. The mailing list _is_ the spam, and if reporting it makes the spammy business less viable, that's a double win.

I mark marketing email as spam, and not because it's easier than unsubscribing.

The vast majority of spam I receive is marketing emails from legitimate companies I bought something from, and who mistakenly think this means I want their marketing emails. I never deliberately subscribe to marketing emails, so if I get one then either:

1) They sent me marketing email without asking, therefore they deserve to be marked as spammers and get the associated hassle.

2) They had some pre-ticked "send me spam" tickybox on a web page designed to distract attention from it, therefore they deserve to be marked as spammers and get the associated hassle.

If the recipient wants to unsubscribe after receiving an automated email, then by definition that mail was spam to them (literally unwanted mail). So marking that mail as "spam" is the correct thing to do, and nobody should care about the sender's feelings nor should they abide by the sender's pleas.

It is up to the sender (1) not to gaud people into subscribing to their newsletters in the first place, and (2) to send actually useful and interesting content to their subscribers.

When I started teaching and my school email address was published on the school's website, I discovered the hell that is the ed-tech marketing machine. 90% of the spam I get from these sources, which are usually individual sales reps of medium to large companies, lack any unsubscribe link whatsoever. And these are firms with which I have zero relationship or transaction history.

Now, that’s 100% spam.

I’m not talking about those at all. Nor the ones where you sign up for one thing and then their “sister company” starts sending you email.

> Now, if you can’t unsubscribe (because there’s no link, it’s broken, or simply doesn’t actually unsubscribe), and this is a legit company, please please please let them know.

I mostly agree with you, but this point only works if the company is contactable. There are some companies sending stuff from no reply addresses.

Those I just spam. At that scale companies need to be testing, if they’ve left no way to be reached.

Companies who don’t make it very easy to get in touch are just hurting themselves. Agreed there.

I send with my name on it, reply to everyone who hits the reply button, and have a live chat (manned by humans) as well as a contact us form.

If someone can’t get in touch with me after all of that... That’s a different problem.

Knowing that it makes people in your line of work cringe makes marking newsletters as spam even more satisfying, so thank you for telling me this. I hope you all cringe so hard your faces get stuck like that.

When you use dark patterns to trick users into leaving a box checked to receive your email, then you reap what you sow.

And if you're not, those users aren't marking your email as spam.

“I keep marking them as spam, but I keep getting emails from Target. Why am I getting so much spam!?”

Those were fun helpdesk tickets to get.

I am not going to be so kind to folks who send try to send me spam.