Gmail offering unsubscribe option

This morning Lifehacker reported that Gmail was offering an option to unsubscribe from some legitimate email lists.
Gmail’s help pages say:

We don’t think you should be burdened with managing messages you don’t want to receive. We do our best to put messages in Spam when we’re pretty sure you won’t want or need them. But everyone has different preferences about the mail they want to see. You may not want to read any messages sent by a certain company or mailing list, while another Gmail user finds these same messages to be valuable.
To help solve this problem, we’re providing you with an unsubscribe tool for some messages. You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!

This prompted a number of us to start testing Gmail to see if we could identify what Gmail was using in order to present the unsubscribe message to the end user. Many thanks to the folks who tested various things and reported back the results.
Conditions where the unsubscribe option is presented include

  • The mail is authenticated
  • The sender has a good reputation
  • The email has a mailto: option in the List-Unsubscribe header
  • The recipients marks the message as spam

This is a small step along the path to an ISP mediated unsubscribe button. As of yet, I don’t know if other ISPs will adopt this model. As well, I expect senders will not like this implementation as the ‘unsubscribe’ option is only presented if they user has marked the message as spam.
On the other hand, this could simply be Gmail’s attempt to implement a feedback loop without the overhead involved in actually managing a feedback loop.

Related Posts

Unsubscribe rates as a measure of engagement.

Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism.

  1. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out.
  2. Most people don’t opt-out.
  3. Therefore, most people want our mail.

This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers, because their unsubscribe rates and complaint rates are very low. The low complaints and unsubscribes must mean their mail is wanted. Unfortunately, the email marketers’ syllogism leads them to faulty conclusions.
There are many reasons people don’t opt-out of mail they don’t want. Some of it may be practical, the mail never hits their inbox, either due to ISP level filters or their own personal filters. Some people take a stance that they do not opt out of mail they did not opt-in to and if they don’t recognize the company, they won’t opt-out.
In any case, low levels of opt-outs or even this-is-spam hits does not mean that recipients want that mail. The sooner marketers figure this out, the better for them and their delivery.

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Fixing high complaint rates and improving reputation

Why do recipients complain about my email?
This question is asked over and over again and there is no one answer. There are a number of reasons and all of them interact with one another.
What factors have recipients mentioned?

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Cox FBL update

Delivery mailing lists have been a buzz this week trying to figure out what is going on with the Cox FBL. Someone tried to sign up for the FBL and received a message saying Cox was no longer accepting applications. They forwarded the rejection to some of the mailing lists asking if anyone else had seen a similar message. Panic ensued. Rumors and futile suggestions flew wildly. OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but there did seem to be more than a little consternation and confusion about what was going on.
Everyone can stop panicking now.
Yes, Cox did stop accepting new applications for their FBL. They were swamped and overwhelmed with applications and had quite a significant backlog. One of my clients got caught in this backlog. I applied for them back in mid-October and they were just approved last week.
In order to solve the backlog problem, they shut down new applications. They will be working through the current applications and when they’ve approved all the current ones, they will start accepting new ones. I expect that it may be a couple months before they’re accepting applications again.
No need to panic. No need to email lots of people at Cox. No need to contact their FBL provider. Remain calm.
If you were lucky enough to get an application in, they will be getting to it as soon as possible. You will receive an email when you are approved.
If you have already been approved, there will be no interruption in your FBL. You will continue to receive reports during the signup hiatus.

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