Wouldn't requiring inputting your email address and then pressing an ubsubscribe button work? That way when the forwarded user tries to unsubscribe, they know they aren't subscribed.
Even working on the copy text would decrease accidental unsubscribes.
Something as simple as "This email was sent to somebody@example.org, if you are this person click here to unsubscribe somebody@example.org" then display the email address again prominently on the unsub page
Particularly when the subscribed user has several email accounts that all forward to another. It is a pain in the ass to click back and figure out exactly which address something came from.
If you have a look at the article, linked from the article, they are hiding the un-subscribe link when the link is inside quotes.
For me, the emails that get forwarded to different accounts (due to email rules), don't have quotes, so the link will show. But pressing the forward button will put quotes around the entire email, so the link won't be shown.
In saying that, there are probably some email setup out there, that doesn't work like mine, and just happens to wrap every email that it displays in quotes...
I don't know if it is a problem with their system, but it has been an issue numerous times with other systems for me.
I don't see how their system would solve the issue that occurs with this system: "inputting your email address and then pressing an ubsubscribe button" If I have to input my email address, I have to determine which email address I have to input.
This is possibly in violation of CAN-SPAM:
You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.[1]
Uh, the section you quoted says you can't ask for anything beyond an email address. It's perfectly fine to ask for an email address. (Though I don't think it's a good idea unless you prefill the box)
I think that's an overly narrow interpretation of "visiting a single page". I've seen very prominent providers who've definitely been around long enough to know the legalities (the hard way) use the "enter your e-mail address" approach.
When I click "unsubscribe", I expect to be unsubscribed. If I just get a page that invites me to enter my email, which the page should know already, I find it's easier, and vastly more satisfying, just to mark the mail as spam.
Ok, if we are going to start using that "mark as spam" button to punish people, maybe then I should go sign up for your comms.io "tell me when the product is ready" mailing list using a bunch of Hotmail and Gmail accounts, and mark your messages spam on all of them when I receive them.
I mean, if we are going to use that button to feel "satisfied" by punishing others whose business practices we or actions we disagree with, rather than to actually mark, you know, actual spam that we shouldn't have received in the first place, why not include some old fashioned tit-for-tat, right?
Seriously: you are abusing the right to be part of a collective spam filter by interpreting the rules of that law in that way. You aren't even doing it in a way that other users of that spam filter are going to obviously appreciate: a lot of people (heaven forbid) actually like receiving the email we sign up for.
Have I "abused" your internal mental rules of email behaviour? I don't care. Perhaps it's analogous the way that you have abused the downvote feature on HN to express your disagreement with my point, but I think I have more justification.
Actually, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders should be punished, and they will get the message. Unsubscribe should be one-click - email users have enough on their plates already, and if I have done something, however small, to improve the behaviour of mailers, I feel great about that.
Regardless, I happily admit to having personally downvoted your comment (although I think I accidentally upvoted your response to dubcanada :() under any set of rules: your comment expressed, not just matter-of-factly, but with a sort of vindictive glee, that you were happy to interpret that law however you wanted, and then use a vaguely related collaborative system to enact your personal punishment on others, despite how other people using that system may feel.
In so doing, your comment didn't address either of the points made by its parent: 1) that that seems to be a narrow definition and 2) that major providers seem to believe that this is fine, and they are large enough to probably know what they are doing. If anything, your comment admits that it is wrong, but that it somehow more personally satisfying to do the thing you want to do regardless. If I can't downvote you for that, I'm not certain why we have downvotes at all ;P.
> Actually, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders should be punished, and they will get the message.
The situation here is not "spammy behavior". Even if the behavior in question violated that law (which it does not seem to), that still wouldn't make the result "spam". When you combine this with your interpretation of that law being somewhat fringe, using the word "spam" here loses meaning.
> Unsubscribe should be one-click - email users have enough on their plates already, and if I have done something, however small, to improve the behaviour of mailers, I feel great about that.
Even if you believe that "encourage behavior" is a legitimate usage of the shared spam filter you are participating in, you have to realize that the behavior you are thereby trying to encourage is really problematic: it's like encouraging websites to just tell anyone your password when they click the "I forgot my password" button.
The various threads on this post have demonstrated multiple cases, some malicious, some benign--and even some from people who claim to be benign but don't pass the "would the person I'm doing this to consider it malicious" test--as to why "click link with no verification of any kind" should not instantly unsubscribe you from these mailing lists.
Moving further into "even if": even if (and I maintain that this is just wrong) you decide "spam filters should be used to determine whether people are in compliance with the CAN SPAM Act", the law states you are actually allowed to have interfaces that include "menus" as part of the opt-out to determine what should be opted out of (as you may want to continue receiving some e-mail, but not things like that).
Meanwhile, the law seems perfectly happy to not even require a link at all: you are actually allowed to require the user to send you a message in reply asking to be removed (in reality, it doesn't even mention having a website at all). Further, the law actually states you can continue to receive mail for 30 days after you initiate the opt-out.
Honestly, in a perfect world, it would seem to be that no e-mail would ever contain an unsubscribe link, and would tell the user "if you want to unsubscribe, reply to this e-mail and tell us you want to be unsubscribed"; there are ways (involving usage of e-mail headers that affect the reply to and return paths) to make forwarding the e-mail then safe against benign mistakes made by friends, and fairly secure against malicious attacks made by people you forward the e-mail, in ways that the link are not (as evidenced by the premise of this article).
You do know that email clients send an email to the email sender that gets recorded correct? For example if you press Mark as Spam in hotmail. And AOL sent you the email using MailChimp, you will show up as "spam" in MailChimp.
That also gets dinged against the sender and an account can be suspended if its too high.
It improves their behaviour. I have lost count of the number of mailing lists I have had to unsubscribe because I simply used their product, without explicitly asking to be put on the list. That's spam, whether they bought my email, or just took it from some other list that they legitimately had.
MailChimp etc are for messages you explicitly sign up for.
I think you would be surprised by how many people 1) Have multiple email addresses forward to one inbox and 2) Don't know how to check what address a particular message was sent to.
I regularly see people reply to our messages and ask us to remove an address that we never sent anything to... (and we have a prominent one-click unsubscribe on every message!)
Something as simple as "This email was sent to somebody@example.org, if you are this person click here to unsubscribe somebody@example.org" then display the email address again prominently on the unsub page