No one-click unsubscribe? It's spam.

[cpursley]

Your marking emails might not have a one-click unsubscribe link but Gmail certainly has a one click spam button.

Two ways you can keep me as a subscriber:

1. Remind me what the hell it is your company does/sells in the first sentence. Between my signup and now, chances are about 95% that I forgot what I even signed up for.

2. Make it easy to unsubscribe. That means a very visible one-click link. Unsubscribing doesn't mean I'm no longer interested in your product. But making it difficult to unsubscribe says a lot about how I will be treated as your customer.

<extra> Go easy on the HTML / CSS / Images. </credit>

[spenvo]

Linked-In has the spammiest email protocol out of any service I have ever used. Even after signing-in there is no one-click-to-unsubscribe button (they split it into about 12 scattered categories), and they create new categories periodically and opt you in to them. This is downright deceitful. Pro tip: change your email to one that you never use. It literally came down to doing this or deleting my Linked-in account--unfathomable to me. Also: no more f@#$!ng emails at 4 in the morning. This seems like a jackpot CAN-SPAM class action suit.

@easternmonk: That's the thing -- I did mark them as spam in GMail. I assumed it would block future emails from Linked-in but not the case. ... Somehow they continued to come in.

@sehugg: That too! I complained about their this on Facebook and I had friends (yes, plural) who had deleted their account because of the spam and yet were still receiving it. Unbelievable

[arbuge]

If you really want to kill ALL Linkedin messages choose the "Filter messages like these" option in Gmail. Then just enter "linkedin.com" in the From field. Done.

[sp332]

Some woman who was in my grandfather's contact list got spammed by LinkedIn for a month. There didn't seem to be any way to unsubscribe. She ended up hating my grandfather, because his name kept showing up on the emails! Of course he didn't know there wasn't going to be an opt-out. I ended up adding her email address to my LinkedIn account, so they would stop spamming her.

[sehugg]

Not only that, but they send you emails even after you have deleted your account.

[easternmonk]

Just mark it as spam in Gmail.

[3amOpsGuy]

change your email address with them to [email protected]

Filter with gay abandon.

[cpursley]

Agreed, spenvo! First thing I do when I sign up for a LI group is unsubscribe from all mailings (excepting a few which I chose to follow on a daily/weekly basis).

The next page after signing up for a LI group should be (unchecked) opt-in checkboxes for the mailings you'd like to receive.

[dpearson]

Twitter, too, has twelve categories of email to opt yourself out of, although I don't believe that you're not automatically opted in to all of them (I unsubscribed long ago, so I can't be sure).

[geogaddi]

I agree completely with your description, of all the social services I have an account with, I find them to be the worst offender of emails and reminders.

[arikrak]

You can also create filters to manage such emails so it doesn't clutter you're inbox, but still lets you see them if you want.

[gknoy]

Change the email you use there to [email protected], and then filter it out. :)

[thoughtcriminal]

I flag all LinkedIn email as spam, and yet I still find the occasional LinkedIn email in my inbox. You could call it Superspam!

[lt]

It's in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act

    You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...

[xur17]

So, that means I shouldn't have to login to my account to unsubscribe, correct? I find this annoying as I tend to click on the unsubscribe link from my phone, and not have the login details with me. I've seen several prominent companies that do this, including Mint earlier today.

[staunch]

I would not interpret "visiting a single page" to mean one-click. Of course, I agree that one-click is the right way to do things.

[mikle]

I love that, but unfortunately CAN-SPAM is a US law, not a universal law.

[larrys]

You can find practically nothing, except for some initial cases many years ago, where someone has been prosecuted for can-spam. I would imagine that like with any crime, you would have to really piss some people off to fall under this act.

(Smoking marijuana is a crime as well as is driving over the speed limit and a host of other things that generally don't land you in hot water even if they are known to the authorities.)

[massarog]

Companies that make me sign in to unsubscribe, stop doing this.

[rocky1138]

If I click an unsubscribe link and the company wants me to sign in, I mark it as spam in gmail.

[csixty4]

One of the ACM's email lists makes you log in to unsubscribe, but then I can't access that section of the site because my membership lapsed.

And this organization purports to represent the state of the art in this field.

[Ironlink]

As a developer, I like to follow the rule of thumb that requests that have a persistent effect (such as changing your subscription options) should be HTTP POST rather than HTTP GET. This is in order to avoid mistakes generated by automated tools or systems which pre-fetch/cache/scan/analyze content. As such, my unsubscribe links lead to a page containing a one sentence summary of what you are about to do, and a form submit button.

This does not apply to the link passed in the SMTP header List-Unsubscribe, which needs to take direct action.

[fleitz]

Having run a mailing list I can pretty much tell you that despite your best efforts to put the right headers in so Google can do their own unsub links, unsub at top and bottom, etc, that despite all this and being fully CAN-SPAM complaint that people will still write emails to your ISP claiming that your sending SPAM.

I'm not sure why but usually it's academics who send these. Maybe people sign them up for mailing lists b/c they are jerks or something. They all seem to be sure that they've never ever signed up for a mailing list.

ISP sends me email about the compliance issue, I put the email address into a form that blocks it from ever being associated with any of the lists on that server, and it spits back an email detailing when they signed up, confirmed, etc, that they've been blacklisted, and then attaches a jpeg image of the headers / footers with unsub links circled in red so the ISP can close the case.

[graue]

> Maybe people sign them up for mailing lists b/c they are jerks or something

Not possible if you have a confirm step. And you should have a confirm step.

[dbz]

Tangentially related: you can create a filter to search for emails with the word "unsubscribe" in them. Generally speaking I don't want to read anything with "unsubscribe" in it, and when I do, I have a nice folder for it.

[greggman]

My pet peeve, companies that don't unsubscribe immediately. Apple for example says they'll unsubscribe you in 10 days. Given all the other things a company's systems can do immediately this one strikes me as spammy

[eli]

Many companies say 10 days as a legal CYA (10 days is the limit imposed by CAN-SPAM Act). In practice, despite what they say, it's usually instant.

[X-Istence]

The companies where I have noticed this it is mainly because they send so much email that the email might already be sitting in the outgoing queue waiting to be delivered...

[michaelbuddy]

not 10 consecutive days of course. just 10 random days in the future of our choosing.

[el_cuadrado]

FYI: most SPAM feedback systems reduce your account weight ('trust score') if you tag your non-SPAM emails as SPAM.

Although I agree with one-click-unsubscribe sentiment, clicking SPAM on an e-mail you subscribed for is not very productive.

[natmaster]

I have one-click no-login unsubscribe button at the bottom of all my emails. To even get an email you have to explicitly subscribe to something. (This is not a mailing list but notification system.) Yet I still get about 1 spam report a day.

I am tempted to just deactivate anyone's account that reports as spam. Is there something else I'm missing?

[Shank]

You might send an email along the lines of "continue receiving these?" every few months and offer an unsubscribe email in there, but that's all I can think of. I'd imagine that's a fairly low spam report threshold as it is.

[DanBC]

I'd be interested in what the current best practice is for sending emails.

For your case, do the emails start with an idiot proof line such as "This is the notification that you signed up for at example.com" ?

[dennisgorelik]

1 spam report per how many sent emails?

[jordoh]

Even if you make it easy to unsubscribe (one click, no sign-in, prominent link), sending an email to any large number of people will still result in "mark as spam" being used on a surprisingly large percent of messages.

Where I work, we send mail through Amazon SES, so we get digests of all the messages that have been marked as spam (stripped of identifying email headers). We see it used on (marketing) newsletters of course, but also on welcome messages; transactional messages (both the "action required to receive money" and "you owe us money" type, though the latter get marked as spam much more frequently); password reset messages; and pretty much anything else we've sent out more than some middling-to-large number of times.

To help deal with this, we include a token in each message and process the digests so marking a message as spam will unsubscribe you (or disable the notification). It's not ideal from our point of view - because we are presumably getting dinged by the mail provider when someone marks a message as spam - but hopefully it helps in the long run since we don't send more messages that will likely just get marked as spam.

When I mark something as spam, I'm doing it to penalize the sender. Whether they made it hard for me to unsubscribe, bought my email from someone else to spam me (hooray for "+blah" gmail aliases), or whatever else - I see it as a different action than unsubscribing. I'm not sure, however, that this difference is commonly perceived. It seems like there are a lot of people out there that use it much less judiciously.

Occasionally I will mark a message as spam in Gmail and get a dialog asking if I want to unsubscribe instead of mark as spam; though I only recall this happening with messages from Google properties. It would be nice (though possibly ripe for abuse) if there was some way to let Gmail know where the unsubscribe link is in the message, so third parties could take advantage of this feature. That way the user could be a little clearer about whether they are punishing the sender, or just want the message to go away.

[polyfractal]

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you are correct. Most people don't realize that mashing the spam button not only moves the message to the Spam label, but also alerts the ISP and ESP which causes negative repercussions for everyone.

I'm fine with people hitting spam because something is legitimately spam. But hitting it because you are too lazy to click the Unsubscribe link is crappy. Or, more likely, because everyone thinks it's the same as the unsubscribe link.

I'll only spam something if A) there is no unsubscribe link or B) I keep getting emails after I unsubscribe.

[binarymax]

This happened to me with TripIt. A colleague invited me and they started sending me spam without any action from myself, and it was to my corporate account without an easy spam button like yahoo mail or gmail. I couldn't unsubscribe without creating an account first. I ended up emailing their corporate address notifying them they were violating CAN-SPAM and they manually removed me, and a PR contact apologised. I advised them they should give non-users a way to unsubscribe. I'm not sure if they ended up following my advice. My colleagues are loyal users, but just because your users love you doesn't mean your non-users want your email.

[cpursley]

TripIt is one of the offenders for certain. The network updates are obnoxious.

[BrianEatWorld]

I got stuck with marketing emails for my start-up and I take a bit of an issue with point one.

How is it the sender's fault if you can't remember why you signed up for an email?

As a matter of best practices, I do remind subscribers. However, it is also quite irritating to be marked as spam, when it was the user who signed up for my messages. By all means unsubscribe, but marking me as spam, especially because I use the highly spam averse Mailchimp is a mean thing to do. Its particularly mean if its just because you forgot what you signed up for.

[delackner]

Just because your boss asked you to do something that many people HATE, doesn't make it better.

People handing over their email address in exchange for user registration or to gain access to a trial version of your product are not interested in receiving sporadic advertising for the next N years.

People are inundated by unwanted email every day, from companies that claim, like Dracula, "but you said I could come inside." Some people don't mind, but some of your target customers will already have very negative reactions to ANY marketing email, so it is incredibly important that you go out of your way to make it clear that you are trying to communicate something that will benefit the recipient, not just a sales pitch you can justify legally sending them.

[X-Istence]

Not sure about others on HN, but for example when I come across an interesting project on HN that has a sign-up page to be reminded when they open I will sign up. I generally won't receive messages for X amount of weeks, and out of the blue I'll get an email. In that email let me know who you are, and what made you interesting enough for me to most likely sign up for your mailing list.

[slig]

My Gmail won't block linkedin spam no mater how much I click on "report spam".

[drx]

I agree.

The other day I had to unsubscribe out of two Yahoo! Japan newsletters that suddenly started to arrive (for two different accounts I've apparently made years before).

To unsubscribe I had to login to both. And for one I didn't even remember the password. Overall it took me half an hour to unsubscribe.

Also if I can't unsubscribe it goes to spam.

[delackner]

Japan tangent: I am amazed on a weekly basis by the mountain of spam newsletters flooding my email inbox by some of Japan's leading internet services. Total lack of respect for the customer. Physical mail today is pretty much 99% spam and 1% bills, and it looks like it might take a miracle to stop email ending up the same way.

[zalzane]

Ironically enough I have more issues with getting spam text messages on my cell phone than spam email messages. It's a shame that either the CAN-SPAM act isn't enforced or doesn't apply to text messages. I'm on the national do not call list as well, and that has had seemingly no affect.

[stephen_g]

One other thing that massively annoys me - one of my email accounts is a gmail account with a fairly generic username, and people are constantly using it to sign up for things - and I'm getting some that have no way to unsubscribe (like BestBuy trying to get me to activate the antivirus subscription I never bought, or asking me to renew - I don't even live in the same country).

So, if you're sending emails, please, please, put a 'I didn't sign up for this account' so I don't have to try and go to the site and reset their passwords and try to get the account deactivated.

Please just have a link to immediately disassociate my email (like Gmail does).

[SIULHT]

But aren't the mails which contain one-click unsubscribe links also spam because they use it to identify which email accounts are active and sell that information to other marketers?

[mathewparet]

1) No email address to be shared beyond a domain. (I can see that some sites partner together and if I register for some newsletter on one site, another site (domain) should not add me in their list, even if both the sites are run by the same company. 2) Email address to which emails are subscribed 3) A single click opt-out 4) Instant Opt-out (many sites say will opt out in XX hours and finally I forget that I unsubscribe, and again I try to unsubscribe.

[JacobAldridge]

Also a good reason to test your emails in different systems - Gmail often snips emails I receive, meaning the Unsubscribe link at the bottom is cut off. I'll bet that leads to increased spam reports.

Aweber had an article last week suggesting you put an Unsub link at the top of your emails as well. I haven't had the guts to do that for my template (EveryDayDreamHoliday) but as a consumer I like the idea.

[darec1]

Ah, if you can unsubscribe with one click, maybe even without logging in. What stops evil Bert over there from unsubscribing you? Sure, there might be some (session) token involved, but that could have been sniffed or brute-forced.

Actually mailing lists do it right, have the subscriber confirm his action by clicking a link in a confirmation mail or such. I think that's called double confirmation.