Unsubscribe (mild rant)

[virtuo]

A few things that have annoyed me lately regarding unwanted (although not strictly unsolicited) emails and unsubscribing.

First, unsubscribe links that require you to log in. I'm looking at LinkedIn here. I signed up for linkedIn years ago. I get frequent (more than one a day) emails from them that I don't read. I click the "unsubscribe" link (usually on my phone), but the site wants me to log in to do that! I can't remember my password and am not on the right device to go through the faff of resetting it. Just let me unsubscribe with a one-off link!

Second, "Thanks for unsubscribing, please allow 48 hours for the changes to take effect". What? I know how mailing lists and email marketing works, it doesn't take that long to take a name off a list. It can (and should) be instant. What's the problem?

Today (and the reason I'm venting this now) I got another email of Play.com, they've turned in to an online Woolworths since Rakuten took over. Awful place.

Anyway, I clicked their unsubscribe link, which 404d. They had an "email customer support" link, which I did and asked fairly nicely to be removed. Precisely 3 hours later I got a reply saying my unsubscribe had been processed, but it'll take 14 DAYS to take effect.

I think having their email marketing service at the top of Everest and only communicating with that using a drunk carrier pigeon wasn't their best idea.

My next reply wasn't nice.


I've worked in online Marketing in the past, and I've built email delivery systems before. Unsubscribing should be easy, and instant. Why do they make it so difficult?

[shaithis]

I have been through similar recently after resurrecting an old email account that had been abandoned long ago due to spam (address was created early 90's and used on many forums and list servers prior to the "invention" of email spam).

Only went back to it as the vast majority of emails now have the subscribe link....but 3 weeks later and still getting ~10 a day (although better than the 50+ a day I was getting when I ditched it, it's not zero!)....and the annoyance is that a few are ones I have unsubbed from.....

[Ttaskmaster]

Silly question - Can you not just mark the sender(s) as Spam and have it sent directly to File 13, at least until the Unsubscribe is finally processed?

[wasabi]

Silly question - Can you not just mark the sender(s) as Spam and have it sent directly to File 13, at least until the Unsubscribe is finally processed?

I just mark them as spam in the Outlook app. Unsubscribing is the 'right' thing to do, but they will do their best not to honour it at best, at worst abuse the info that you still have an active account.

[virtuo]

Silly question - Can you not just mark the sender(s) as Spam and have it sent directly to File 13, at least until the Unsubscribe is finally processed?

I've got a very strict junk filter on my desktop mail client, but not on my bog-standard android mail app, so my phone gets everything until my desktop has deleted it and the mailbox re-syncs - I'll usually go a few days before running my desktop mail client.

I'm more irritated by the fact it's such an effort for large companies to stop sending me electronic communications when I ask them to. Hence the question, why do they make it so difficult to unsubscribe?

[Ttaskmaster]

I'm more irritated by the fact it's such an effort for large companies to stop sending me electronic communications when I ask them to. Hence the question, why do they make it so difficult to unsubscribe?

Because someone now has to sit down and go through the massive list of email addresses they've bought or created (John, JohnA, JohnB, JohnC, John111, John112, John113, etc) and actually delete each and every one of the hundreds of unsubscribers' addresses... honestly, you're SOOO inconsiderate!!

[burble]

I get grumpy when I unsubscribe from a mailing list that I didn't subscribe to in the first place to be told that they'll email me to confirm the removal. NO!!

I get even more grumpy when I buy a product from somewhere, specifically select that I don't be to be on their mailing list and then a while later receive an email telling me about their great mailing list and asking me if I want to subscribe.

[Kumagoro]

The magically turning back up on their mailing list gets on my tits too.

Chemist direct being one of them.

Another similar thing is companies sellng your details. I never got any calls on my mobile but after I signed up with ovivo I started getting ppi calls and even though they said they don't seem you details I reckon they did. Towards the end which is when I signed up.

[Agent]

I get grumpy when I unsubscribe from a mailing list that I didn't subscribe to in the first place to be told that they'll email me to confirm the removal. NO!!

Ah yes, or when they don't call it a "mailing list" to get around it.

"We see that you brought X product from us....click here to review it on a 3rd party website that now have your email address, even though you said you didn't want to subscribe to our mailing list and we promised to not use your details for anything but the payment processing."

[Saracen]

While I entirely agree with both the reasons and emotions of virtuo's opening post, and that it shouldn't be either a pain, or take excessive time, to get off one of these damn lists, can I suggest a pre-emptive strike?

How far you take it can vary, and anyone with full control over email addresses in a domain control panel can obviously be more granular, but at a minimum, we can all use one address for 'proper' mail, and another one (or more) for other stuff.

If you then track, with a written list if necessary, who has been given this address, and who that, you can then simply dump an unwanted address, and not collect mail from it. If there are people on an address you do want to continue to receive from, change the address you gave them.

So if you gave 5 companies buy1@virtuo.com and company 3 is being a pain, change 1, 2, 4 and 5 to buy7@virtuo.com, and dump the old address.

Because I control my own domain, I just give those relatively few companies that get an email address out of me their own. If they jerk me around, I delete that address. And the domain is set to reject unknown addresses, so if they don't use a valid address, the mail just disappears into the ether. They can then bombard that address with whatever junk they like, but I never see it.

And, of course, the other obvious pre-emptive measure is to be selective about who you give ANY email address to. And obviously, the same with bells on for phone numbers. For all that getting unwanted email is a pain, unwanted telesales calls are a million times worse.

[burble]

I used to do what Saracen suggested and had different addresses for different sites (play@mydomain, amazon@mydomain and so on) but it was very easy to get out of the habit of doing it and I'd often find that I'd want to place an order on a new site but couldn't get into my Exchange server at the time.

It was interesting to see which sites sold my details on though and I'd be able to tell when a site had been hacked reasonably quickly.

[BobF64]

Unique addresses is good, and something ive done for years, it also makes "hacking" your account harder as, assuming you dont reuse passwords, doubles the difficulty of one sites breach causing you problems elsewhere.

Im rapidly accumulating a list of things that pee me off, aside from Unsubscribing that doesnt work.

As part of a program of changing email addresses, so far I've encountered

- websites that dont update their mailing list when you change the address, meaning you need to change the address back, unsubscribe, then change it again

- websites that dont let you change your email address, for any number of useless reasons but, foremost, "security reasons", ie they arent very good at security and cant think of a way to prevent accounts being hacked and stolen

- websites that insist on you contacting their support minions to change the address, then asking dumbass questions to verify you when you submitted the request via their own support systems that REQUIRE you to be logged in first

- and last, but not least, Apple! my advise is, never EVER change your apple ids primary address if you have an iOS device, you have to change it in at least 4 or 5 places independently, and even then, some things continue to keep asking you to log in with the old address which no longer works

[Zak33]

Today (and the reason I'm venting this now) I got another email of Play.com, they've turned in to an online Woolworths since Rakuten took over. Awful place.

Anyway, I clicked their unsubscribe link, which 404d. They had an "email customer support" link, which I did and asked fairly nicely to be removed. Precisely 3 hours later I got a reply saying my unsubscribe had been processed, but it'll take 14 DAYS to take effect.

this is THE bugbear of the general public I think......

ignored &over burdened servers to deal with the requests to leave...... and then a KILLER slow response

which in my case hasnt occured and im still on it

From the client perspective .. if I left and it worked immediantely.. I'd have no issues with re-subscribing to get the updated emails later on... when back in the market

BUT.. when leaving is SOOOO hard.. you'll not get me back next time

[virtuo]

While I entirely agree with both the reasons and emotions of virtuo's opening post, and that it shouldn't be either a pain, or take excessive time, to get off one of these damn lists, can I suggest a pre-emptive strike?

This is precisely what I do, I have a catch-all set up so whenever I sign up for something new I just use whateversite@oneofmydomains.com, then if they end up selling my details I'll know exactly where it came from, and I can proxy those tainted addresses to a blackhole if they become unmanageable.

My laziness is that all of them still come to the same inbox so I don't have a million accounts to check..!


One fun thing to try, which used to work a lot back in the day on smaller sites that ran their own mailing list, is on an unsubscribe form put "%" as your email address. It's a MySQL wildcard and would often just delete every email address out of their DB. Coding standards have come up a bit in recent years though, so doesn't work much any more.