Pet peeve: unsubscribe links that take me to a page asking for my personal information (usually my email address). I'll usually close those pages and report the email as spam.
If you know my email address, then put a token in the unsubscribe link so you can retrieve my address on your end, rather than making me retype it. If you don't know my email address -- maybe you are sending to a list, not to me -- then I consider you spam because you don't actually have the direct ability to remove me.
This would certainly be convenient, however if your mailing lists contains a lot of old people then they forward your emails to their friends. Their friends who are annoyed by this then unsubscribe the original recipient without noticing that the email was forwarded by their friend.
This is a real problem for us - not a made up scenario. So we remove the auto-filled email on the unsubscribe form.
A way to mitigate this issue is to ask for a confirmation before marking the email address as unsubscribed, showing the retrieved email address in a large font as to prevent someone who received a forwarded email from mistakenly unsubscribing someone else.
I’ll add another pet peeve to the list: unsubscribe links that remove you from only 1 of N number of lists they have. You click unsubscribe but a few days later you’re still getting mail because you got removed from “news” emails but this one is a “promotional” email.
I recently unsubscribed from all but one (the account tips) of the Firefox newsletters, because they were sending too much stuff I wasn't really interested in. The next day I get a new Email from them.
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.
That's pretty ironic coming from a company whose main value proposition is "we aren't assholes like other tech companies are." That and the annoying crap you have to disable when you install Firefox to get a blank new tab page.
The simplest way is to click the gear on the new tab page and uncheck items you don't want. If you uncheck everything you will still have the gear icon present. If you want to hide that then your are in userChrome.css territory.
The domain would only be relevant if the domain was a specific opt-out domain. If it was just https://company.com/unsubscribe, DNS would only reveal company.com. The path (/unsubscribe) will be encrypted.
Yeah I find it really annoying also. But surprisingly, they don’t do that just to add friction to unsubscribe. There is a real problem that it solves.
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.
So why do they forward those emails to someone in the first place? Especially to those who don’t want them? You’re pretty much suggesting that “helping others spamming people isn’t spamming”
Whether or not an individual forwarding an email to another individual is technically "spamming" is moot; most spam is company-to-individual/automated-system-to-individual.
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.
That is a problem with the implementation that is simply fixable by removing the unsubscribe headers from the forwarded emails. Or marking unsubscribe links in a way that makes the forwarder remove them automatically.
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.
Annoying for sure, but one benefit of this approach is due to forwarding. For the moment, let's assume you have a newsletter you enjoy. If you forward an instance of that newsletter to your friend, and they aren't expecting it, they might hit unsubscribe. With one click, they'll prevent you from receiving future newsletters.
I think the better approach is simply showing the "Intended for johndoe@example.com" next to Unsubscribe, but I could see why they ask for your email.
as per RFC-2369 and use the same mailto link inside the mail body. This is convenient, conventional and solves the problem you describe, while also allowing users to add feedback as they see fit in the body.
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.
> I don't see why you have to involve the web at all
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.
RFC2369 from 1998 is "very new"? Funny. I guess it's either a matter of perspective.
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.
FWIW, this solution isn't as easy to implement as you'd think. I've seen unsubscribe pages harvested for email addresses when they show the full address and used urls/tokens that weren't sufficiently secure. In the case I'm thinking of, the home-rolled algo that generated the unique links was bugged enough that you could reverse it, and I was surprised that someone actually took the time to do so.
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?
Use the same link in the body of your mail for your unsubscribe link.
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.
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
> List-Unsubscribe is not widely enough adopted to be the only means of unsubscription (yet)
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.
The term "double-opt-in" is spammer propaganda. It falsely implies that getting your email added to a spammer's mailing list, regardless of how it happened, is "opting in".
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.
It absolutely is propaganda. If a single verification of consent is "double opt in", then zero verification must logically be "single opt in". The evil option is reframed as good, and the neutral option is reframed as extra good. Anybody who uses it is either ignorant or a spam sympathizer.
OK, fine, maybe I shouldn't use the term. Pretend I said, "I run a mailing list where I want to make absolutely sure that nobody is receiving mail without their active and informed consent and that nobody is unsubscribed without their active consent either." I think my question still stands?
If you know my email address, then put a token in the unsubscribe link so you can retrieve my address on your end, rather than making me retype it. If you don't know my email address -- maybe you are sending to a list, not to me -- then I consider you spam because you don't actually have the direct ability to remove me.