Gmail and unsubscribing from mailing lists. Total failure?

Techcrunch has an article about a new feature in Gmail.

“Gmail Tries To Make It Easier To Unsubscribe From Spam Newsletters, But Fails”

I am also very surprised that they did this. It will only send an unsubscribe request if it sees a certain piece of information in the header of the email. Spammers never actually include that header information! It’s something that is within proper mailing lists, like those run on Majordomo and Mailman.

Screenshot of Unsubscribe feature.

AOL had a similar problem years ago (they might still have it, I don’t use AOL..) where they had the “Report Spam” button right next to delete. The same button would also delete, so users were simply clicking “Report Spam” on everything that they didn’t immediately recognize. People were reporting newsletters that they had signed up for as SPAM because they simply did not know how to unsubscribe.
That is exactly what Google has just done with Gmail. As the TC article notes, there is a way to have gmail unsubscribe you from mailing lists, but it seems that it’s a hidden feature.

Granted, unsubscribing is a common complaint about Mailman lists in particular. The link to unsubscribe is actually in the header information of the list.

Header information from a Mailman list.

See the “List-Unsubscribe” information at the bottom? It’s a link that you can click on to unsubscribe. But.. the vast majority of people reading email these days have absolutely no idea how to even get to the header information, much less know that you’re supposed to look there for information on how to unsubscribe. Most people reply to the list with “Unsubscribe” (which was correct… if it was a majordomo list) or “ARGH GET ME OFF THIS LIST!” (or something like that!)
Now with Gmail, they can unsubscribe from legit mailing lists… and report the list as SPAM at the same time.

I think that’s a really really bad idea.

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Tags: google