Gmail's 'Unsubscribe' Tool Comes Out of the Weeds 129
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."
Re:Did Google do this right? (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:AWESOME (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:AWESOME (Score:4, Informative)
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.