Preventing Unsubscribes in Forwarded Emails

Article aside, it's much better to have a one-click unsubscribe that just works.<p>It's an edge case that someone will unsubscribe from someone else's mailing list or click it by mistake, so making every single person (99% who are unsubscribing on purpose) confirm, log in, enter their address or receive a confirmation is an infuriating waste of time.<p>The best way to mitigate this is a simple "You unsubscribed whatever@gmail.com", with a little undo button in case it was a mistake.<p>And if all this still goes wrong... if the person liked your newsletter enough, they'll figure out what happened when they stop getting it.<p>(Side note: I've really been hoping GMail and other clients would accept a URL in email headers that would handle unsubscribe, so they could add a button to the UI. I know that's oversimplifying everything, but it would significantly improve the email experience.)

Honestly, I just like having them email me when I've unsubscribed. That way, if somebody else does it, I know because I receive a notification.<p>If I'm unsubscribing from a spammy newsletter, I don't mind them sending exactly one "unsubscribe confirmation" email immediately that I can then have in my records later on in case I forget whether or not (or when) I unsubscribed.

After reading the linked article and thinking WTF-hows-that-supposed-to-work, then reading the linked article, and reading the linked article again, I think I found the big caveat: It relies on unstandardized undocumented behavior of some email clients. Specifically, it doesn't work in Gmail.<p>But the problem actually seems real, makes me glad that I am not an email marketer. If you provide a one-click unsubscribe to your users, you don't want them to give somebody else that link. Reading through this HN thread, I see two and a half other solutions mentioned:<p>(1a) Require users to enter their email address on unsubscribe. I hate that one because frequently it's really hard to figure out at which of my email addresses the message first arrived.<p>(1b) Require users to confirm the unsubscribe The better version of the unsubscribe forms from alternative (1) have the email address pre-filled, which wouldn't stop someone who knows what they are doing from unsubscribing others. But it gives those unsubscribing others unintentionally a hint about how they ended up with that message.<p>(2) Send an email confirmation after unsubscribe This way you can just re-subscribe if one of your friends unsubscribed you. Looks like some people in the discussion below like this approach, others hate it.<p>If I had to pick, I'd probably chose (2) because that's the only way of making sure an accidentally unsubscribed user notices what happened.

<i></i>If you want to take this even further, here are a couple of other suggestions:<p><pre><code> Require confirmation instead of one-click unsubscribe** </code></pre> Even better - allow unsubscribes by having the user take a photo of themself next to a handwritten sign with today's date, their email address and a request to be unsubscribed. Then you know it wasn't an accident!

It seems a bit scary that forwarded mails can be changed. As a spammer, send something interesting and make it an ad when forwarded?

I love the idea of having a banner prompting forwarded email receivers to sign up.<p>Regarding the unsubscribes, have you tested tweaking the copy? An example could be: "Unsubscribe XYZ@mail.com" instead of just "Unsubscribe"?

As long as it's possible to work around this, it's OK. I have far too many 'academic conference' emails (no longer an academic, so I don't want them) where it's hard to unsubscribe because I'm getting the email from a chain of forwarded address (many of which I can't actually send mail from anymore).

<i>someone that would share an email with 85 other people</i><p>then<p><i>it turns out that one of the people who received the forwarded email thought it was spam and clicked the unsubscribe link</i><p>It may be ugly, but the system works :)

One less technical way I've seen this handled is with a footer something like:<p><pre><code> ---- If your friend or colleague has forwarded this to you and you would like to SUBSCRIBE to our mailing list, click here. If you are the subscriber (THEIR@EMAIL.ADDRESS) and would like to unsubscribe, click here. ---- </code></pre> The unsubscribe page also has large text with the e-mail address that has been unsubscribed and an undo button, and the unsubscribed account is sent one more e-mail (after a short period) confirming the unsubscription with a link to re-subscribe if they want to.<p>It doesn't prevent malicious unsubscription, but help to prevent or reverse accidental unsubscriptions of the type in the article. It also "works" in all email clients.

&#62; The Litmus team discovered these silent unsubscribers when they noticed a long-time fan removed himself from the Litmus newsletter after sharing an email with 85 of his coworkers.<p>What an idiot.<p>People here seem to think unsubs might be malicious; they don't seem to think that people getting email don't want it and just click any unsub link they see. Don't forget that the vast majority of people are hopeless with computers.<p>Anyone sending email to me along with 85 other people, especially if it's something like the Litmus product, is going to annoy the fuck out of me.

Litmus has some very clever code. When they first released their analytics feature, I reverse engineered it because I couldn't believe they could track forwards. Their "time spent reading message" was another cute hack.

Wouldn't requiring inputting your email address and then pressing an ubsubscribe button work? That way when the forwarded user tries to unsubscribe, they know they aren't subscribed.

This reminds me of why I am glad I have plain-text mode enabled in Thunderbird. I do not want my emails to be webpages, and I do not want email senders using clever tricks to determine how I see my emails, and how my recipients see them.<p>This problem is much better solved with an unsubscribe followup email containing a re-subscribe link.

Can you imagine the abuse? You forward a cat video and they see 'Help I'm trapped in a strange city and need money!'?

How does this work?

I like this one (with a mailto link):<p>&#62; To unsubscribe, send an empty message to unsubscribe@...<p>Though it might be difficult to understand for less technically minded users, and might be a problem if you don't know what address the mail was sent to.

What if instead one just focused on lowering the amount of times someone forwards an email containing an unsubscribe link.<p>Perhaps a "send to a friend" link in the email would help?

It's sad that only Gmail, and no other email clients, sanitize HTML email to ensure that stuff like this is not possible.