Gmail's 'Unsubscribe' Tool Comes Out of the Weeds

itwbennett writes "Starting this week, a new, clearly marked 'unsubscribe' link will appear at the top of the header field in marketers' emails. Previously only appearing for a small percentage of users, the feature will now be made available for most promotional messages with unsubscribe options, Google said on Thursday. Email recipients do not need to take action for the links to appear."

Comments

Re:AWESOME

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been having bad luck on that part

Probably because by clicking that button you're proving that a human exists at the end of the email address. And because you were silly enough to click it, you're probably exploitable in other interesting ways, too.

We need "vetted" unsubscribe links

[Anonymous Coward]

They should only put the unsubscribe link in for scrupulous vendors who will actually unsubscribe you and not sell your email address as "confirmed to be working".

Re:We need "vetted" unsubscribe links

[TheGratefulNet]

google does NOT work for us. there is zero reason to trust this.

its the same way as the postal service in the US re: spam. I once asked the letter carrier if we could put a sign up on our mailboxes saying 'no junk mail or UCE please'. he said that this is how they make most of their money these days and that they are paying to have their 'junk' put in my inbox. you can see who works for whom; and its not the recipient!

google also makes money on their search and have you noticed that when you search for something that has a tech nature and also a salesy nature, the sales stuff comes first and you have to trawl thru many pages to find the actual tech info?

have you noticed that there are PAGES of fake sites that serve only ebay ads, trying to fool you into clicking on them? google does nothing (zero, nada, zilch) to stop this even though the Powerful Google could easily fix this if they wanted.

unless I'm paying google, I'm not the customer and I have no expectation that they will respect me or my wishes.

Re:Did Google do this right?

[weave]

Yeah, sure, Google will do that with future emails from that marketer. But what about when your email is sold to others or that same marketer just sends again using a different address? :(

Re:Misdirected ham

[jopsen]

This is my biggest complaint. A few years back I had someone in Australia buy plain tickets online and used my email address. I got the info about the account and tickets, did a password reset request and got into the account and canceled the tickets. I sure hope they had a hard time when they showed up at the airport.

Wow, sure it's annoying when people accidentally uses the wrong email... I can understand that you complain about. Given that you had to commit a federal offence by illegally obtaining access to an account that wasn't yours.
I mean becoming a criminal is worth complaining about, but you could just have contacted the airline, which is perfectly legal, and asked them to resolve the situation.

Instead of going out of your way, to be an a**hole, and actually make yourself a criminal in the process.

Verification emails should be sent on all new account creations and when signing up for any mailing list. Clearly the latter won't happen because companies want the emails to go to someone, they don't care who.

Sure, but an error somewhere in the system, does not make you owner of the account. Seriously, why don't you think before you hit somebodys password reset. That's clearly illegal.

I mean, wow, just wow, given how long time the US is willing to lock you up for violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, I'm surprised you decide to just go ahead... No wonder 1% of the US population is in prison :)

Re:Did Google do this right?

[halltk1983]

Presumably, if a company gets blacklisted, they will contact Google. Then Google will provide evidence that the unsubscribe requests were being ignored, in violation of federal law (CAN-SPAM Act). Then the company finds the customer that was ignoring it and removes them. And the internet gets a little cleaner.