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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."
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.
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".
I hope the unsubscribe link points back to google, and that they keep track of what I have unsubscribed. If they see me unsubscribing the same spam several times, they can safely conclude that the spammer will not respect the unsubscribe, and can start filtering the stuff out. Even better, they now know this is a spammer, and can filter out everything he sends to any gmail address, or at least add a block the first time someone else clicks on the unsubscribe link.
It's not as bad as it used to be, I don't think. I recently went through the exercise of unsubscribing every spam mail that came in to the accounts of two former employees at the company I work for, and the spam level dropped almost to zero, around one spam mail per day rather than 30-50. Granted, the kind of spam you get on the work account of a reasonably sensible employee is probably going to be from more reputable sources on average than most personal accounts, but they weren't all reputable-looking. For sure I always do a little checking up on the source before I click that "unsubscribe" link on my own mail.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
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.
where are the people that bark google has too much power and are "intrinsically evil" because of it? where are the people crying that their privacy is being breached because it scans their email for context? where are the people claiming they have been "scroogled"? where are you naysayer of every change google makes to a (free) product? where is your vitriol toward google for perpetrating a clearly heinous act? then again, you could just mod me down for your bitter repute.
have you considered that google actually tries to follow their "dont be evil" edict?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I wish google implemented captchas for sending me email.
How does that work?
Well, if you, the unverified person, wished to send me an email, Google would send an email back containing a captcha. /dev/null.
If you solve the captcha, you would enter my "first-line-of-defense whitelist", and the e-mail gets sent to me.
Needless to say: otherwise, your e-mail would end up in
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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
That sounds like something restricted to an internal mail system since it requires a centralized database of mappings between aliases and email addresses.
Google seems to be pretty good at handling databases for other data...I think they could handle this.
I do exactly this same thing with a database for my home mail server. Every site I deal with gets a different e-mail address, so I know who sells their lists. There have been one or two sites that have had the alias deleted because they didn't pay attention to whatever opt-out method they claimed would stop the e-mail.
This technique also protects me from phishing, as an e-mail that isn't addressed to mybankalias@mydomain.com can't possibly be from my bank.
proper aliases that are not revealing your real email and can be easily discontinued with a bounce to sender as result.
I haven’t studied SMTP for a long while, but I think what you’re describing isn’t possible with ordinary email over the ’net. That sounds like something restricted to an internal mail system since it requires a centralized database of mappings between aliases and email addresses.
No, Outlook.com has solved this the way it should be. They are using real standalone email addresses for aliases. It can be completely different than your main email, and by default it shows up in a separate folder in your inbox. If you kill the alias, it is for the rest of the world the same as killing a standalone email address, and mail to it will bounce.
I agree with your sentiments, but I also understand the parent poster's frustration.
There's a guy living in West Virginia who shares my surname and the first initial of my first name. He keeps giving out my Gmail address to businesses as his own. I suspect he's either old or just stupid, rather than intentionally giving out a fake address, because some of the emails seem to be stuff he likely signed up for intentionally. But I keep getting his appointment reminders, his renewal notices, and other crap - and it's been going on for several years now.
I have, on several occasions, contacted a number of these businesses and explained the situation. They always apologize and remove me... But, six months later, I'm back on their list because the guy has been back in for a service call on his Hyundai, a dental cleaning, or whatever. It's incredibly frustrating.
I have tried contacting him, but it's not as easy as you might think (or else he's just ignoring me). So I can understand the frustration the parent feels, and I can see why someone might succumb to the temptation of moving on to malicious behavior.
#DeleteChrome
Is it just another link to the unsubscribe link already in the email? In which case, I probably won't want to click it, for the usual reasons (instead clicking on Delete or, more likely, Spam).
If Google is letting you unsubscribe from email lists/spam etc which don't have an unsubscribe option, by acknowledging your click of their unsubscribe button, and then treating further emails from that sender as having been unsubscribed from by simply dropping them (or sending back an unsubscribe request without the users getting involved) then it's a little more cool.
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.
Exactly so. Unsubscribe from one, and two or three others show up from different sources within a few days.
Since I never subscribed to these in the first place, I'm never going to unsubscribe. I'm going to mark them spam.
Sorry Google, but I'm not playing along. I'm going to stuff your spam filters (which work very well thank you) full of these UCE mailings whether or not they contain unsubscribe options. Punish every on of them and force them to stop adding people to mailing lists without a request to do so.
This is simply wrong headed. I can't believe google doesn't understand how these guys work. Why would they want to enable this kind of practice to continue?
On my company email, I've got very effective Spamassisin filters for these types of things, and I mercilessly categorize them as spam. I expect nothing less from gmail.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
To be fair, there is a grey area here. It's quite possible that at some point a past employee was genuinely interested in hearing more about progress at a potential supplier of interest, and chose to sign up for more information. Maybe the supplier never followed through with the specific product the ex-employee was interested in, maybe the in-house project that would have used it has since changed or been cancelled, or maybe there's just no-one else still at your business who cares even if the ex-employee did.
In all of these cases, updates that were originally actively requested and sent in good faith are now effectively unsolicited commercial mail from the point of view of everyone left at your business. The sender has no way to know that if you don't tell them, and probably has little interest in upsetting someone who was at least near their potential market by continuing to send them after being asked to stop.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.