Hundreds of emails get blocked daily by your spam filters, but sometimes one slips through. You look it over and it appears to be very legitimate. You don’t remember clicking to subscribe to this newsletter, but you see the classic, You are receiving this because you subscribed to one of our partners blah, blah, blah and this is an excuse for us to send you spam. Yeah, its true: XYZ company is one of our partners, we do their mass mailing and we grabbed your address at the same time! So, now you’re tempted to click the Unsubscribe button, but how can you tell if its legit? And how do you know that clicking unsubscribe won’t tell the spammer, Hey I’m alive and I actually read what you sent – send me more?
According to the CAN-SPAM act for businesses1, a commercial email must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. We can also interpret this as, Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. This rule is not always followed by legitimate senders, and it is used as a trap by spammers. How do you tell the difference? Well, nothing is 100% foolproof. These days, this is mostly because so many legitimate newsletters are poorly designed (see my previous post “Battle of the Newsletters“).
Lets have a look at the unsubscribe features that exist:
1) The web click: this is the common “Click here” to unsubscribe, open a webpage and transmit all required information. Some sites will ask you to click “Confirm” and you’re done. For legit organizations, it’s an easy, trouble-free unsubscribe button. As consumers, we like that (spammers do too).
2) The email click: the link opens a ready-made email with unsubscribe in the subject “ all you have to do is hit Send to confirm. Most non-techies are a bit afraid of this, but this was one of the first methods to manage mailing lists (remember Majordomo2?). Since the recipient is a bot waiting for your answer, the TO field might not look too friendly. Unlike the web click, this one won’t work if you subscribed using an alias.
3) The blind click: the link opens a webpage with a URL that is completely unrelated to the business you received the email from. No fields are filled in and you have to enter your email yourself – twice. Lazy spammers or lazy legitimate senders? Again, its very difficult to tell the difference.
4) Snail mail me: yes, there are STILL some businesses that do this. A good example is a well-known Canadian tax software company: they sell their product online for almost double the store price AND add shipping on top of that. You want to stop this “legit scam”? The unsubscribe info at the bottom asks you to send a LETTER, with additional postage costs, of course. (For our youngest readers out there, a snail mail letter is a piece of paper you put in the red or blue box out on the street!)
While scammers try to look legit, legitimate businesses sometimes act like annoying spammers who really don’t want you to unsubscribe. If you’re not sure which category they belong to, add them to your blacklist. If your email provider doesn’t support blacklisting, you can easily do that using the Junk Mail settings in your mail reader.
Avoid using unsubscribe when: they ask you for a password, to create an account, to confirm your birthday and/or mothers name, or anything other than your actual email address.
Spam-type unsubscribe samples:
Method 1: Click here http://www.zzzzzzzzzzzz.ru/?otifa=8mIT45Y201Q01&nebucuaotefk=9K6t1sM254627&remove=email@domain.com to unsubscribe
Method 2: Click to unsubscribe: mailto:target@domain.com?&Subject=unsubscribe&body=user@domain.com
Method 3: Unsubscribe from this e-mail: http://zzzzzzzzz.com
Legit unsubscribe samples:
Method 1: http://click.zzzzzzzzzz.comr/YKB0PL/OFC33/0RFTG65/V11EEDC/EI67E/cZ/h
Method 2: Click to unsubscribe: mailto:target@domain.com?&Subject=Unsubscribe
Method 3: http://www.zzzzzzzz1.com/services/email.html
Method 4: If you do not want to receive the offers from zzzzzz Canada, write to us at: zzzzzzzz Canada ZZZ, 7008 Road zzzzz
References:
1. Majordomo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majordomo_(software))
I can’t believe the snail mail unsubscribe. This is outrageous! And that is legal? Wow! I guess CAN-SPAM act still has a long way to go.
Intuitive judgment please !
Governments want to prevent ‘spam’ (eg pharma spam, 419 scams, etc) but they prefer to leave general email marketing regulation fairly toothless. If you ask me its because businesses lobby to retain the right to market via email, even though consumers (voters) share a different view and see most email marketing as spam.
and this really is legal?