Dear email marketer: if you don’t make unsubscribing easy, you’ll get marked as spam

Causing unnecessary frustration works against you

Raúl Kripalani
Aug 26, 2017 · 3 min read

Raise your hands if — at any point in life — you’ve felt that unsubscribing from an email list felt like a brain puzzle.


Spam and blacklists

Most people nowadays use Gmail or Outlook.com for their email, and these apps are very clever in their spam filtering.

Every time somebody marks an email as spam, Google and Microsoft take note and lower the reputation of the sending domain.

If enough people mark your emails as spam, eventually your entire domain may be classified as spam and blacklisted.

You can check if your domain is blacklisted here.

Make it easy

As soon as I get tired of your emails and I decide to unsubscribe, I will expect to find a one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails.

No login required (yes, it’s me)

No captcha (yes, I’m a human)

No confirmation (yes, I know what I’m doing — I won’t be missing out — thanks for caring).

Just a one-click unsubscribe button. Simple.

If that is not the case

If that is not the case, I will mark your email as spam.

And everybody else should do the same.

If enough people do the same, say ‘goodbye’ to your reputation and ‘hello’ to being spam.

For example, recently I’ve been receiving aggressive, persistent marketing mails from a company (I won’t even make the effort to conceal their name):

None of the emails had an unsubscribe link. This is horrendous and ignorant practice, done by a marketing company itself.

Their last email was this. Yes, you messed up! You are now in my spam folder and I hope others do the same.

Another tip: don’t send confirmation emails

I’m talking about that pesky “you have been unsubscribed successfully” email.

From the UX perspective, this is terribly paradoxical. I was unsubscribing to receive no further emails from you, remember? Hello?


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Raúl Kripalani

Written by

🎈 Engineer @ Protocol Labs, working on libp2p. Previously: ConsenSys, Red Hat, FuseSource, Atos, freelance. From Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.