I Want To Unsubscribe, Not "Manage My Preferences"

I think requiring a log-in is actually against the CAN-SPAM regulations.<p>FTC.gov's web site states: "an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender"<p><a href="http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business" rel="nofollow">http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...</a>

When an email tries to be sneaky with the old "Manage my Preferences" trick, I flag it as spam. They should know better.<p>BONUS: if anywhere in the email they mention the word "webinar", they're gone.

Absolutely agree. We (AnyLeaf) send a weekly email newsletter to our users, with one-click unsubscribe. Companies that make unsubscribing difficult are ruining it for everyone. Even though we are very clear about the fact that we'll be sending email and make it simple to unsubscribe, we still get users flagging our messages as spam. This seems to be largely because unsubscribing from email newsletters has become so annoying that a significant fraction of users will just mark a message as spam rather than figure it out, even if the message is not truly spam.<p>It's hard to blame them, especially when huge senders like Target make it so difficult to unsubscribe that the author of this blog post couldn't figure it out:<p><a href="http://bigfatmarketingblog.com/2011/01/17/adventures-in-email-unsubscribing/" rel="nofollow">http://bigfatmarketingblog.com/2011/01/17/adventures-in-emai...</a><p>It's a shame that RFC 2369, which provides a standard for unsubscribing from mailing lists, has never been widely adopted.<p><a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt</a>

I report them to the FTC and tell them that I did if require anything more than a click or two and send them this link:<p><a href="http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business" rel="nofollow">http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...</a><p>File a complaint here: <a href="https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/</a>

If I didn't opt-in and they send me a message that I have to log in to opt-out, I mark it as spam. Sometimes I'll also log in and remove myself, but not always. Depends on the company.<p>On the other hand, if there's a simple 1-click link, I will usually click it and merely archive or delete the mail.<p>Webmasters: It's in your best interest to make it easy to unsubscribe. It only makes people mad. It doesn't make them stay as customers.

<a href="http://www.otherinbox.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.otherinbox.com/</a> comes handy for part of this problem. One of the default folders that OtherInBox creates in your Gmail account is an OIB/Unsubscribe folder/label. Then you can label messages from meetup.com as OIB/Unsubscribe, then all future messages from meetup.com will go there.<p>Unsubscribing from Meetup groups isn't an option if you want to subscribe to their Google Calendar. And you might want to get some messages from Meetup but not others (maybe you just want reminders for meetups), so labeling as spam is not an option.

At least there is some (complicated) method to unsubscribe.<p>I try to unsubscribe from Amazon's affiliate spam newsletter for years now, but it just doesn't work. I can toggle the "subscribe" box on the website as many times as I want - no matter what the website displays, the mails just continue to arrive in my inbox.<p>I've contacted the support numerous times now, but they either tell me that "after unsubscribing it takes some time until you stop to receive the mails" or that "we've unsubscribed you now manually". Of course this never worked.<p>So if anyone from Amazon is reading this: This concerns the German "Amazon PartnerNet" affiliate program and the message category that I can't unsubscribe is "Feedback zum Partnerprogramm". I'd happily send you my account information if there's any chance of fixing this annoying bug.

I use Mailchimp for <a href="http://dlewis.net/nik" rel="nofollow">http://dlewis.net/nik</a> and all the emails I send have both "unsubscribe from this list" and "update subscription preferences" on every email. Clicking the former will unsubscribe you -- no log-in required. (Comically, I once forwarded a copy to someone who clicked it, to see what would happen, and blammo, I was unsubscribed from my own list.)<p>The second is used for changing your email address or your name. That's it.<p>As a <i>publisher</i>, I actually prefer it this way. If you do not want to get my emails, I don't want you getting them. I'm not writing for people who don't want to read.

This word "spam", I do not think it means what you think it means. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)</a><p>"Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately"<p>It seems as though a lot of people on HN think that any email message they didn't want to get at that moment is spam. Reminds me of the misunderstanding of the work "hacker".

I wrote up some ideas on best practices for unsubscription recently, after trawling through my inbox to clear the clutter. <a href="http://softwareas.com/best-practices-for-mailing-list-unsubscription" rel="nofollow">http://softwareas.com/best-practices-for-mailing-list-unsubs...</a><p>If you're doing one-click unsubscribe, a smart practice is showing a message with other ways to stay engaged, e.g. Twitter ... and providing a one-click undo (ie re-subscribe).

Whenever I sign up with a service, I try to use the "+" trick.<p><pre><code> foobar+linkedin@gmail.com </code></pre> That way, if worse comes to worst, you can just block the whole destination email address.<p>Sometimes this doesn't work, though, which is annoying.

The best solution I have found is just to use Gmail filters (if you are using Gmail). I have about 20 emails a day that get labeled "useless" and are immediately archived or deleted...<p>Plus: you can define pretty specific filters (incl. keyword based if you just want to remove certain emails from a certain address/domain, for example containing "upgrade", "marketing", "try", etc)

I really do hate it when you have to 'manage your preferences' when you want to stop receiving email more-often-than-not that you don't remember signing up for.<p>What's more is, if you can somehow manage to remember your account details and navigate the labyrinth of menus to get to where you want to be, you then have to unsubscribe and believe it or not, some websites have even told me it could take up to a week for the changes to take affect.<p>Ridiculous is the word the springs to mind.<p>Most recently though, I have started to mark emails which don't offer me a one-click-unsubscribe as spam, that'll teach them.

I use a challenge-response system called Active Spam Killer.<p><a href="http://a-s-k.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://a-s-k.sourceforge.net/</a><p>When some dastardly spammer adds me to their list, despite the challenge message explicitly telling them not to, I then add them to my "blacklist" and never hear from them again.<p>Note that you do have to be running your own mail server to get this system working; and you have to edit the lists from the command line. Those challenges aside, this software has eliminated vast quantities of spam and unwanted list mailings for me.

I despise it when I try to unsubscribe and this comes up for me.<p>My simple response: click "spam" button in my email, thus decreasing their deliverability.<p>If you send out newsletters or whatnot, be sure to make unsubscribe obvious and single-click, otherwise you will face the ultimate in email marketing payback... no one seeing your messages.<p>As someone who used to be heavy in email marketing, deliverability is the holy grail, and it doesn't take too many times as marked as spam before you are lost forever.

Seconded: may I hereby propose a new standard for email, the "bite me" button? Something to throw the entire company in question down the memory hole.

I never unsubscribe from lists. Any time I get an email from some new list I've apparently been subscribed to, I add a new filter to automatically delete any mail coming from that domain. I don't think my email is physically able to receive any mail at all from facebook, google, yahoo, and most of the other big domains out there, and I don't miss it at all.

I can't remember the site off the top of my head, but something recently wanted me to go through an entire sequence of 'exit interview' forms in order to unsubscribe.<p>My response in the 'feedback' field was quite satisfying to write, but I doubt it'll ever actually be looked at.

I setup a mail filter to forward the email back to wherever it's sent, multiple times, and delete that email from my inbox. I've generated email threads from LoveFilm where they've had an entire conversation with themselves, great stuff.

The whole "unsubscribe" thing when you haven't subscribed to anything is a lie.

This is why I love gmail filters. Opt-in spam is terribly easy to filter out.

Does anyone use a service like mailinator or spamgourmet?