Unsubscribe

Over the last two months, I've been doing an experiment and I'm happy to say it actually seems to be working. I have been clicking on the "unsubscribe me" link in every piece of unsolicited (or possibly solicited but no longer wanted) email I receive. As of the last week, I've noticed a marked decrease in the amount of such mail.

via www.quid.pro

I started doing this today on every piece of unwanted marketing email I received. We'll see how it goes.

(Incidentally, it's kind of interesting to see the number of different interfaces that email marketing companies have created for unsubscribing from an email list. There wasn't a common interface among the 15-20 lists that I unsubscribed from.)

Comments

[Anil Dash]

I've been doing this for a while and it works quite well. Noticed the same plethora of unsubscribe methods when I was thinking about whether it'd be possible to do a Gmail userscript that would let me add a native-looking Unsubscribe button into the UI to handle this as part of the app itself. Guess that could be crowdsourced if people specified what method a particular newsletter uses, kind of like Bugmenot.

[Brittney Gilbert]

I, too, did this. Seemed useless for a while, then got inundated with junk. So one day I deliberately went back and began unsubscribing myself, as well as unsubscribing from all in the future.

Some were quick and easy, like, "Bye!" Others were like a really bad break-up: "Tell me why you won't stay with me! I want the truth!"

[Abe Hassan]

My favorite is the text that goes something like, "exclude me from future mailings".

[btrott]

My favorite is the one where unsubscribing adds me to a new mailing list.