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."
Did Google do this right? (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.
but i thought google was evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:AWESOME (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Google implements RFC 2369, film at 11 (Score:1, Interesting)
All that Google did here is implement a fifteen year-old RFC. As Benny Hill would've said: "Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig ...deal."
This is nothing earth-shattering. I coded an unsubscribe link in sqwebmail, for exactly the same thing, circa 7-8 years ago (too lazy to trawl a bunch of dusty CVS logs to get an exact date). Really, every time Google goes ahead and does something related to an obscure, unimportant RFC, it's front page news, these days.