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.
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>
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.
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.
Punish those who abuse it, not everyone. That’s all I’m saying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's why there usually needs to be some direct or indirect commercial gain involved too.
I said please three times because laziness on your part is really really bad for us who do it right.
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.
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.
It can be difficult to tell if it's a fake UniversalBankCo email or a real one, even if you are a UniversalBankCo customer.
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.
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.
Keep this in mind if you run a list and are ever tempted to mass block traffic from your site.
We don’t do any of that, but that’s also something I’ve never thought about.
Can’t you email them?
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.
I appreciate the pragmatism here!
Do you know of any articles or useful content around this?
If you're receiving unsolicited marketing emails, that is the literal definition of spam.
Random emails are... random.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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 "[email protected]" 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if you're not, those users aren't marking your email as spam.
Those were fun helpdesk tickets to get.
You missed that key line. It may surprise you because you personally don’t do this, but regular people love signing up for email newsletters.
This is very different from email sent unexpectedly when you make an account somewhere. The OP was clearly talking about a list the user has asked to receive.
These tend to have fairly clear unsubscribe links in the footer.
The one exception —again, just in my 20 years experience doing this crap— is when you pay them, eg "10% off your first order when you subscribe to our newsletter". This is still more coerced consent than informed, but better than most subscriptions.
We get that you don't like marketing email, but plenty of people do.
I also regularly walk clients back from doing exactly the same thing. The perks in marketing don't give a flying French Fancy what the law is. They care about absolute volume.
I did a little exercise last year, took a screenshot of every order form I submitted. I reported a dozen companies to the ICO last year, with documented examples of companies wilfully ignoring GDPR regulations.
Yeah, I'm also fun at parties.
For several reasons:
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. I spend a lot of time making sure it’s suuuper easy to unsubscribe. 2. Spammers know how to get around spam protections when they want to. They can switch domains and do other shady stuff a legit company can’t, so by marking my email as spam because it’s “easier” you’re not helping the fight against spam but rather hurting a legitimate email sender.
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.
If after all of this you still can’t unsubscribe, hit that spam button twice!