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

Posted by timothy on from the and-don't-come-back dept.

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."

6 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Re:AWESOME by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. We need "vetted" unsubscribe links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  3. Did Google do this right? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Did Google do this right? by sbrown7792 · · Score: 5, Informative
      They do. If you look here, Google states that:

      If a sender continues to send you email after you tried to unsubscribe from their messages, new messages from this sender will go directly to Spam.

      Google has their shit together when it comes to filtering spam

    2. Re:Did Google do this right? by weave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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? :(

  4. Re:Misdirected ham by jopsen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 :)