The Unsubscribe Promise
Or deceit, whichever. Although, promises were made to be broken, weren't they? Or was that rules?
Anyway, there is a lot more to unsubscribe buttons than meets the eye. True, some emails are coming from legit senders whom you’ve asked to send you emails. Here, I’m focusing on the other senders.
Unsubscribing is hard.
It sometimes feels like the unsubscribe button should be replaced by a “send me more crap” button.
Typically, one of these happens:
- the unsubscribe link is in a light grey, tiny font so it’s hard to find, forcing you to almost read the whole small print to find it
- they tell you it takes 5 or 10 days to unsubscribe. Really? WTF? This is really taking people for idiots
- you get redirected to a page where you’re asked to give all sorts of personal details like name, address and phone number
- they ask you to input the email that should be unsubscribed, as if they didn’t know it
- the unsubscribe link leads nowhere, or there’s some sort of failure in the system and you can’t unsubscribe (ever tried to unsubscribe from the Miami Dolphins newsletter? I’ve tried — 1 million times)
- your request to unsubscribe gets ignored
- you receive an email (another one!) that lets you know that you’ve unsubscribed
I don’t know a single person for whom unsubscribing “just works”.
Keep in mind that every time you subscribe to something, you might have to unsubscribe down the line, and that it might not work.
Unsubscribe links are dangerous.
A link is not just a link, don’t just click on a link someone you don’t know sent you because:
- you might get taken to a website that will download malware to your computer
- you might be the victim of a phishing attempt
- someone might want to collect data on your browser, your computer set up, your location
- spammers might want to check which email addresses are active. And this is the hardest to counter: if you want to unsubscribe, you have to give the email address that you want to see unsubscribed, there’s no way around it. In fact, it’s enough for you to react to an email (like by opening it or clicking on a link), to let the spammers know that your email is active. As far as they’re concerned, it’s a license to kill.
Knowing all that, would you keep unsubscribing from an email whose origin you don’t know? If you respond yes, then I haven’t made my point clear enough.
What you should do is not unsubscribe, but rather bin the messages. Or put them in a folder where you’re never going to see them.
Don’t let them know what you’re up to, don’t let them know your email is active, and by all means don’t give them more personal details.
Of course, a lot of websites are really honest and considerate about the amount of stuff they send, and they do unsubscribe you if you ask them. The problem lies with the other senders and their false promises. And this, my friends, has to stop.
