This is a real problem for us - not a made up scenario. So we remove the auto-filled email on the unsubscribe form.

Subject: "Was it something we said? crying emoji". Body: "If you want to go... we won't stop you. [...]" Footer: "You're receiving this email because [...] subscribed to Firefox Account Tips.

Yeah, thanks for the ~~tip~~ spam.

Felt like going through one of those dark pattern flows that Spotify or Amazon have when you try to unsubscribe from their paid plans, trying to guilt you into reconsidering.

(Still better than Google, though.)

Legitimate mailing lists have problems with people forwarding emails, when the recipients of the forwarded emails click the unsubscribe button, they will unsubscribe the original recipient who didn’t want to be unsubscribed.

As to why they forward it in the first place: how would I, an individual, know whether or not my mom will want to use the 20% coupon code for a cosmetics store I just received, but don't want to use? I'd ask her. I can ask her via an unsolicited phone call or email. Am I a spammer if I do that?

Similarly, if my mom clicks the "unsubscribe" link on what I forwarded, mistakenly thinking that it was sent to her directly by $costmetics_company, that sucks for me if I ever want to use their coupons.

An even more annoying situation is when someone in charge of procurement for a business forwards a "shipping confirmation" email to an employee as a means of indicating that the employee's requested purchase is on its way. If that employee makes a mistake (e.g. they have a lot of commercial email in their inbox and click the wrong one/are sleepy/whatever) and clicks "unsubscribe" on that shipping confirmation, the procurement person won't get any future confirmations for any orders for anyone.

There are mitigations to this (the shipper could use transactional emails without unsubscribe links, the procurement person could do something less lazy than just forwarding the email wholesale), but in the real world those often don't happen. So autofilled unsubscribe then causes problems for random upstream people, not the forwarded recipient.

Someone on the other hand was trying to wave away the whole idea of one-click unsubscribe due to this which seems to me more like lobbying towards adding another step requiring one to put their email in in order to unsubscribe (or put it another way - decreasing the unsubscribes).

So auto filled unsubscribe needs to exist. I never want to go back to the universe where that is not regulated and easy-to-use. Also in the UK there’s still loads of physical paper spam and I would hate if that was also the case for e-mails.

I think the better approach is simply showing the "Intended for [email protected]" next to Unsubscribe, but I could see why they ask for your email.

    List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>

I don't see why you have to involve the web at all, but I can tell you that if I have to go through a bunch of bullshit when I want to unsubscribe I'll just mark it as spam instead. However appreciated and anticipated your newsletter is, you have to consider that most newsletter subscriptions are probably either accidental (failed to uncheck some box when signing up for something entirely different) or straight up unsolicited, and people like me will basically purge all their subscriptions without discrimination regularly as the crap builds up.

Because List-Unsubscribe is very new and not supported by all email clients or ISPs (inbox service providers). Since adoption is so spotty, most ESPs (email service providers) start from a baseline of a web unsubscribe system and (maybe) supplement that with List-Unsubscribe as well.

This situation will likely improve over time.

Adoption of it doesn't matter insofar that you can use the same link in the body as a fallback, which was part of my suggestion.

"ESPs" don't care because cumbersome and convoluted multi-step unsubscribe is a selling point for the majority of people who use such systems. They have moved from simple mail based unsubscribe which was the norm for years.

https://twitter.com/mohd_irteza/status/1227772431605149696?s...

https://twitter.com/zachalberico/status/1247951473876422656?...

It's basically impossible to know if you've done the right thing.

> Sorry for any confusion. Select the box next to each desired communication option or deselect to stop communications.

So... if I uncheck the “unsubscribe” button that stops communications?!?

Yeah - very confusing though.

Marriott Bonvoy Assist @MBonvoyAssist 9 Apr Replying to @zachalberico Sorry for any confusion. Select the box next to each desired communication option or deselect to stop communications

Now I think I understand what they are saying, but it’s not a great explanation either. A new sentence before the ‘or’ would have been helpful.

I run a newsletter where both subscribe and unsubscribe do double-opt-in (i.e., both subscribing and unsubscribing send you an email with a confirmation URL with a token - each newsletter has an unsubscribe link but that link doesn't include the token). Maybe this is a mistake? Is the norm that anyone can unsubscribe anyone else from newsletters?

Just use mailto links in List-Unsubscribe.

    List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>

It's convenient, standardized and removes the need for further confirmation because you know who sent the mail.

That said, I don't see what the big deal is. If you forward a newsletter issue in its entirety to someone else, they hate it and feel confused enough about receiving it to click the unsubscribe link, maybe the sender deserves being unsubscribed. The absolute most you should do at this point IMO is to notify them that they were unsubscribed.

> Just use mailto links in List-Unsubscribe.

List-Unsubscribe is not widely enough adopted to be the only means of unsubscription (yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23360654

> maybe the sender deserves being unsubscribed

That's super presumptive/rude. Also not how interactions between people work, at all. The potential consequences of a mistaken forward-unsubscribe are also often quite large: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23360619

I am not suggesting List-Unsubscribe as the only means of unsubscription. Read my post again. It also is widely adopted. gmail.com, Mail (OSX, iOS) and outlook.com together probably represent the majority of clients now and all support List-Unsubscribe.

> That's super presumptive/rude. Also not how interactions between people work, at all. The potential consequences of a mistaken forward-unsubscribe are also often quite large

Maybe my view on the matter is colored by the fact that my friends and family don't send a bunch of useless marketing to me, and I have the decency not to send them any. Still, my suggestion solves the problem if you have it without involving a convoluted process to cancel a subscription. I absolutely could not care less about the dire consequences of not receiving a steady stream of cosmetics coupons, but whatever floats your boat, email-based unsubscribe works.

https://www.telemedicus.info/urteile/Wettbewerbsrecht/Werbun...

That term is super widely used in spam-prevention, commercial email sending, transactional email sending, and inbox provider industries.

You can disagree with the phrasing if you want, but that doesn't make it propaganda--not any more than the Orwellian naming of the "No Child Left Behind" act makes the law itself propaganda.