Hey developers, stop forcing me to login to unsubscribe
Dear Sender:
There's nothing more annoying than clicking that 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom of your email only to be asked to login first. I know it sucks when people opt-out of your transactional emails, but deal with it and let people unsubscribe with one click. If you do this you may even get some valuable feedback.
If your transactional email provider doesn't have a single-click unsubscribe option, find another service. I recommend every developer test out what a recipient sees.
Sincerely,
Users of the Internet
136 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadOh, thought so.
Nobody ever complained, which kinda goes to show exactly how spammy LI is.
There may be a way around this, but if no session was required, then couldn't someone just make a bunch of GET requests to the unsubscribe url for each user id and unsubscribe the entire user base?
I'm looking at you, LinkedIn and Twitter. I've unsubscribed from about three or four waves of your bullshit. No, I don't care about what I might have "missed on Twitter". I didn't subscribe to this, you spamming fucks.
Personally I give them the benefit of the doubt and try to unsubscribe with ONE click.
There is no good reason to make people click more than once.
It's shitty UX regardless of whether it's a violation of law, IMO.
Original: It's a violation of CAN-SPAM law to put unsubscribe behind a login process. Asking for a password violates the requirement that no additional PII except for the email be required to process the opt-out.
From the FTC:
Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.
http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-com...
Explained at http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia... and excerpt below:
A. What matters is the “primary purpose” of the message. To determine the primary purpose, remember that an email can contain three different types of information:
1. Commercial content – which advertises or promotes a commercial product or service, including content on a website operated for a commercial purpose;
2. Transactional or relationship content – which facilitates an already agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer about an ongoing transaction; and
3. Other content – which is neither commercial nor transactional or relationship.
If the message contains only commercial content, its primary purpose is commercial and it must comply with the requirements of CAM-SPAM. If it contains only transactional or relationship content, its primary purpose is transactional or relationship. In that case, it may not contain false or misleading routing information, but is otherwise exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act.
More on that here: http://www.the-dma.org/press/PrimaryPurposeFactSheet.pdf
Many "transactional" emails probably fail the above test. It's shitty UX to make you login to opt-out, even if it's not against the law.
That depends -- have you ever signed up with the sender? If so, you are asking to be spammed. When a company requires a signup, they are breaking the law, therefore you must not sign up. By signing up, you make the spam legitimate.
If they send you an unsolicited e-mail, they are criminals. If they require a signup to opt out, they are criminals. But if you sign up, they aren't. That's why they want you to sign up.
Even ignoring the first amendment, there is no enabling clause that grants the general power to regulate communication.
You may have the right to speak but you don't have a right to force the populous to listen.
Communication is two way, spam is one-way.
You have the right to expose people to communications with no Congressional control whatever. Congress shall make no law. You may shout on a street corner, you may set up a PA system until your neighbors are driven to madness, you may place pornography on a billboard, etc. Congress can do nothing to stop it.
Are you trolling. You consider the constitutional right to free speech to encompass things like setting up a PA in public that is so loud it physically harms people?
It's not a right to amplified speech, nor "free shouting".
Freedom of speech does NOT involve the freedom to send individually addressed messages to anyone. There is no freedom to spam.
CAN-SPAM doesn't apply to political or non-profit organizations.
A while back a forum spammer decided to use my Gmail address to spam forum sign-ups. I got Gmail to filter most of them into the trash (the spammer used a variation of my email address I don't use. Gmail allows variations in email addresses). Afterwards I wanted to clean things up and a lot of the senders require that I log in first to unsubscribe. That they would sign me up without verification is bad enough but requiring that I login to unsubscribe made it just too difficult. So now I just filter everything that was sent to that variation of my email and mark them all as spam.
Lose-lose for everyone.
It's a crappy process to deal with, and can affect you for a critical day or two. An example being that one of clients collected email in a greasy was, and increased their email blasts from 25,000 to 75,000.
I'm sure they wanted to reach more people, but yahoo and a few others marked ALL of the messages as spam due to massive increase in volume from this client.
Advice: Do things in a non greasy way, and while you may grow slower because of it, your users, and their email providers, will like you more for it.
http://www.list-unsubscribe.com
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en
If marking as spam or unsubscribing are approximately equal effort, I will unsubscribe; if unsubscribing is even slightly more difficult than marking as spam, I mark as spam with no regrets. Even if you don't force me to login but make me do some monkey trick like type "CANCEL" into a box => spam! One click is the only acceptable method, and don't hide the link in a bunch of small print legalese, because I'm not going to expend much effort looking for it while the nice, inviting "Mark as Spam" button is just sitting there waiting for me to click it.
Spam is in the eye of the recipient. If you send me marketing emails that I do not want, it is spam. Even if someone else would want it.
If people didn't mark stuff as spam, then there would be absolutely no reason for marketing people not to send spam to everyone. Even if only one person in 10,000 wants to read it, why not? But the option of marking stuff as spam is a way of making my attention as not free for you.
I don't have the link anymore because this was already a couple of years ago, was someone taking this ages-old advice to the test. Clicking the "unsubscribe" link on all spam delivered to an old spam-infested email address, he found that it reduced the amount of spam received to that address by a significant amount.
Then the domain block goes into place. /dev/null, auto-trash, or whatever the local filter rules support.
I know, the "Here's an email to confirm that you hate our emails" message isn't anyone's favorite... but if it helps companies improve their unsubscription mechanisms, I can let it slide.
Happens all the time, and now you've unsubscribed someone who is a high value member of the list.
I'm still getting e-mails from them to this day.
I would also like to see some sort of standard - like email header with link, that would unsubscribe you. Outlook/thunderbird/etc could just show button (probably next to "mark as spam" :)) and you couldjust click and be done. I think google tried something like this, but I've never heard of anyone else.
Companies can, and do, take out lists of subscribers and pass them to agencies to run campaigns for them, with potentially long lead times. Still stupid, but that's usually the reason.
Regarding standard, the List-Unsubscribe: header is sort-of that. It's not used much because there's little reason to - most clients don't do anything with them.
- We have a complex series of integrations (marketing automation -> CRM system -> app -> transactional e-mail provider) (as one example) where propagation isn't real time and could take a few days (if say, each of these were propagated on a nightly batch).
- Something could go wrong with any of these.
- It's better to err on the side of caution and give a super-conservative estimate and always beat it by a huge margin, than give an accurate estimate and occasionally break it (particularly with something as sensitive as unsubscribes).
"Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days."
which means the recipient gets 30 days (from receipt of each email) to opt out, the sender has 10 days to process the opt-out.
If I try to unsubscribe from an email list and am presented with a login prompt, I report the sender as spam without an instant of hesitation or regret.
It's ridiculous how hard some services make it. Especially banks - I had someone in the US sign up for a bank account with my email, and I was getting fairly important sounding emails (like "your account had insufficient funds to pay [automatic bill payment]" and stuff), and there was almost nothing I could do - to contact the bank, you had to log into your account and use the "secure contact form" or phone them (which would be an international call, annoying time zones, etc.). I stopped getting emails eventually so they must have figured it out eventually!
I just click on "Spam" and, if it continues, set up a filter to /dev/null.