On June 4th, 2006, I bought something using Chronopay, a payment company based in the Netherlands. I used a unique email address to sign up. Above is a list of all emails sent to the unique email address that only Chronopay has for me.

This is concerning for a number of reasons:
1. It’s against EU law.
2. Has my email address been sold? Or stolen?
3. Have the details of my credit card been sold? Or stolen?

Given the evidence, I would strongly advise never to deal with any company that uses Chronopay. They’re clearly either scumbags of the highest order, or (in spite of what it says on their website), they’re not hacker-proof. Either way, I’m glad that I change credit cards every two years.

(In case you’re wondering how I signed up: Gmail gives you unlimited unique email addresses. If you’re johndoe@gmail.com, then johndoe+spammers@gmail.com also gets to you. The same’s true for Google Apps accounts. Because of some incompatibilities with badly-written code, I actually rewrite a similar-looking email address on my mailserver.)

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.

Photo by Robert Llefi, used under licence

I might as well be honest. I am a Gmail fanboy. I think it’s fabulous.

Whether I’m using it from abroad, or removing out of office replies, or using the mobile application, I appear to have blogged about it quite a lot in the past.

So, why stop now…

A recent addition to my Gmail-chomping armoury is better Gmail plugin for Firefox. Among other things, it automatically makes your session secure (using https://), and has a number of useful “should have been in Gmail all the time” type hacks - like a ‘filter assistant’ which makes it easier to filter emails, or a simple ‘mark as read’ button. Finally, there are some skins, too - tweaking the look of Gmail to make it easier on the eye. If you use Firefox, this is highly recommended.

I don’t use Google Apps, but just a regular Gmail account. As a byproduct of this, I run my own mailserver (to forward my emails over to Gmail and do some rudimentary rewriting), and pipe all my mail through SpamAssassin. As a result, mails with suspected spam are marked [5pam], and automatically filtered away within Gmail. Until recently, this has been a massive improvement to my spam filtering - it’s caught a ton of pieces of spam that the standard Gmail filters were incapable of. (I should mention here that I get 18,000 pieces of spam a month, so any reduction is a good plan).

However, I think about a month ago, I noticed that this was getting less useful: because Gmail has, all of a sudden, got much better at spotting spam. Much better. Instead of my setup catching around 100 additional pieces of spam a day, it’s a lucky day now if it manages to catch three pieces of email that Gmail has unaccountably ‘missed’.

Are you seeing this Gmail improvement?

I’m also, this month, using Google Calendar exclusively to schedule my working week. This is already being a great success; but that’ll be a proper review, I guess, later.

(As a small hello to the lawyers - yes, it’s called Google Mail here, yes, I know. I’m using the name Gmail here since that’s what the rest of the world knows it as, mm’kay?)