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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."

4 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