An idea for better email unsubscribing
Posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 11:40pm. #
My Gmail account has a “report spam” button. But not an unsubscribe button.
Instead, I need to go looking through the email for the unsubscribe link. Sometimes it’s at the bottom; sometimes not. Sometimes it’s missing. Sometimes it’s called ‘Change your settings’. Sometimes (like CBS’s email system) it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s an email link; sometimes it’s a link to a website that requires you to log in to change your settings; sometimes it’s a link that instantly unsubscribes you; sometimes it’s a link that takes you to a page that contains a link to unsubscribe.
It’s a mess, email lists. And clearly, I’d like to know which are email lists run by decent people, and which are run by charlatans who don’t understand how to run decent email lists.
So. Here’s a plan. RFC2369 allows you to set a way to unsubscribe, using the List-Unsubscribe header, which can contain either an email address or a URL which allows them to directly unsubscribe. Can mail programs simply look for this header and add an ‘unsubscribe’ button to the user interface? (If it’s an email address, it should silently send an email; if it’s a URL it should go to that URL?) That would be brilliant from a user point of view.
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Media UK, the website that I run from home, sends 9,200 emails every day: either media jobs (it’s free to add a job, by the way) or media news.
As a reputable emailer, I’ve registered with both AOL’s postmaster service and Microsoft’s equivalent. Both forward emails from people that hit ‘report spam’ on my emails to me, so that I can manually unsubscribe them and ensure they don’t get any more email. It’s a tiresome job, taking ten minutes or so every few days, more where badly-behaved mailservers strip too much from bounced email.
As a reputable emailer, I also include an unsubscribe link in every email (which some services retain when bouncing mail back to me), and I also replicate this link using the RFC2369 List-Unsubscribe header, which allows me to unsubscribe people even if the mailserver strips the body from the bounce.
But surely AOL or Microsoft could implement a system where it automatically unsubscribes their users if they report me as spam, as long as I’m using a compliant List-Unsubscribe header? It would save me time, and make their users happier. It might also assist mail systems know what’s spam and what’s not: at least, to score RFC2369-compliant mailers a little more highly.
(As a by-the-way, Media UK uses double-opt-in, and has an unusually full and clear policy around email. Your comments on this, and the rest of that privacy policy, would be welcomed.)
Just like out of office replies are broken, so it would seem that list subscription similarly is. How can we change the world for the better?
Photo by ‘unsubscribe-me’. Used under licence.
