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Block and Unsubscribe
- reustle 11y agoI wonder if this is just a shortcut to create a filter. That would make the most sense, at least.
- jusben1369 11y agoYep. I think less sophisticated users would be intimidated by creating a filter and this solves for that.
- braythwayt 11y agoCount me as a “less sophisticated user.” I lack the patience to futz about clicking and selecting on things when all I want to do is block someone.
- smackfu 11y agoYeah, the filter config for GMail is very full-featured. Like there are a dozen actions you can take on a mail, all listed on a single popup. Makes sense to provide an easier path.
- coldpie 11y agoBut no regexes :(
- byoung2 11y agoDoes anyone know how the unsubscribe feature works? Does it follow the unsubscribe link in the email, or does it use some other mechanism?
- wnevets 11y agoI believe it uses a header the sender includes with the email http://www.list-unsubscribe.com/ http://www.list-unsubscribe.com/
- 9fb29947 11y agoCool. I doubt those intrusive marketing emails will ever include that header though.
- asddubs 11y agoit's a neat feature for legit websites not wanting to end up on spam filters, though
- kpcyrd 11y agoAlso a cool way for a spammer to verify if somebody is receiving those mails.
- ascagnel_ 11y agoTrue, but that's a low- to no-value lede; you're not very likely to sell to someone that's actively trying to avoid you.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jonknee 11y agoWho cares if they are receiving them and never seeing them because they are blocked?
- detaro 11y agoSomeone who easily can send other mails to the now verified address from somewhere else?
- DaCapoo 11y agoI'd assume so. The CAN-SPAM[0] act mandates that the unsubscribe link must not contain any authorization, e.g., you click the link and you're immediately unsubscribed. This is just trading a click in one location for a click in another, but it's a neat feature to not search through the entire email to try to find the unsubscribe link. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscribe_compliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscri...
- hammock 11y agoCAN-SPAM does not actually require one-click unsubscribe, but many senders include it anyway. From the primary source: "Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice [to opt-out] to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. " https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
- eli 11y agoYou're both kind of right. A one-click unsubscribe is not required, but if you do use a web link for unsubscribe, the form can't require the user to enter any information beyond their email address. (Unsubscribe forms that require you to login are probably violating this law.) "Reply with the word REMOVE in the subject" is also a CAN-SPAM complaint unsubscribe method, though.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hammock 11y ago>If you do use a web link for unsubscribe, the form can't require the user to enter any information beyond their email address. I don't get that from my reading of the actual law or FTC guidance. Can you explain how you came to your conclusion? Full text of CAN-SPAM: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-108s877enr/pdf/BILLS-108s877enr.pdf http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-108s877enr/pdf/BILLS-108s...
- philo23 11y agoIt's worth noting on top of what others have said, Gmail (and assume most others too) will only display the unsubscribe button from whitelisted mail servers, as far as I'm aware. The reasoning being that it could be used by spammers to confirm an email address is real/valid after a user attempts to unsubscribe at which point they could sign them up to more spam. So don't expect your own emails to show the button by just adding the List-Unsubscribe header, unless you're using something like Amazon SES.
- arbitrage 11y agoThis has been oft-repeated conventional wisdom from years, but I think we're giving most spammers way too much credit. I run several mail servers, and addresses that have not existed for well over a decade, and always give 5XX responses, still get spam. As long as spam is profitable, because it pushes all negative externalities off to someone else, it is not worth a spammer's time to cull their lists. I simply do not see this happening.
- daddykotex 11y agoThe post says the Unsubscribe feature is coming to Android, but will it be also available in regular Gmail?
- hullo 11y agoThat's where it started. Open a marketing message, look at the from line. If they're implementing it, you'll see "Marketer name" <marketer@emailaddress.com> Unsubscribe
- myth_buster 11y agoWhat I don't understand (possibly noob question), is the scenario where I get spam and I click on "Report spam" to be prompted with "Unsubscribe and report spam". I'd never subscribed to it so why am I asked whether I would like to "Unsubscribe". Is it that the spammers got hold of my email from somewhere and "Subscribed" me automatically? Shouldn't "Report spam" implicitly imply that it's not a subscription?
- plorkyeran 11y agoPeople use the Report Spam button on things that they explicitly signed up for all the time, and Gmail has adjusted its behavior to match how users use it rather than try to persuade them to instead do the right thing.
- myth_buster 11y agoInteresting. Isn't there an information loss since now they would have to infer the motive to decide whether to blacklist the sender?
- coldpie 11y agoYes. I end up with loads of useful emails in the Spam folder. Mostly it's stuff like shipping and billing notifications. I check the Spam folder daily, now, since so much useful mail ends up there.
- dazc 11y agoThat's right. All too often I've subscribed to a mailing list expecting the odd email now and again only to suffer a deluge of totally irrelevant and annoying 'updates' on an almost daily basis. The worst offenders also make it difficult to unsubscribe. Hence, the report spam option.
- PeterisP 11y agoOpt-out lists are a big issue. A checkbox hidden somewhere that's enabled by default doesn't mean that "I have subscribed" to the mailing list, both in the common sense and also is prohibited in many legal jurisdictions (not USA, AFAIK), leaving a default checkbox simply doesn't count as obtaining consent, it is a well known 'dark UI pattern' that even the consumer protection laws have understood and explicitly implemented. Such messages are just another kind of spam, and the right thing to prevent this, naturally, is to block the sender as a spammer. Underneath there is somewhat proper a mailing list that supports unsubscription, so an unsubscribe message can and should also be sent, but it doesn't change the fact that all the subscribers were added without their informed consent - if you built a system with opt-in by default, then you yourself built a system where it is impossible to say that you actually want to subscribe, the only provided checkbox then represents a choice between the default (no informed consent) and an explicit refusal of consent.
- danielrw7 11y agoWhat happens when you later need to see emails from that email address again? Are the emails saved somewhere?
- hesselink 11y agoIt says they go to Spam, so I assume it will be treated like other spam (autodelete after 30 days, IIRC).
- danielrw7 11y agoOK I see that now. Thanks
- logicallee 11y ago(What I'm writing applies to individuals, not mailing lists.) I think a bounce would be preferable! Why waste someone's time? I think it should only hell-ban via a special checkmark. By default it should cause a bounce saying that this person is not receiving email from that address. Then neither sender nor recipient have their time wasted going forward. I mean for the 0.01% of cases where someone would literally create a new address just to continue harrassing you, yeah, you could then hellban their second address.
- jamiek88 11y agoWhy should we the general public worry about being 'fair' to spammers? It's like the whole ad block thing. Now people have the power to do something about it they are asked to be 'reasonable' and won't somebody please think of the advertisers? Nope. They had their chance to be fair with us. Techies have always been able to block such stuff but now it's seeping into the normal users ability/ ux upgrades hide complexity of doing so. I feel as sorry for the spammers and ad trackers as I did for Borders when Amazon came along. Not at all.
- kohanz 11y agoThis will actually be a useful feature for me. I consistently get e-mails from a procurement business somewhere half-way across the world that somehow thinks that my gmail address is that of one of their employees. I routinely get CC'd on e-mails containing invoices, BOMs, customer inquiries etc. I've tried reporting as spam, phishing, and even replying to all on message that includes customers of the business to say "I'm not who you think I am and you probably don't want strangers seeing these e-mails", all to no avail and these messages just keep ending up in my inbox. They're not always from the same person (it's a mid-sized company with varied customers). Now I can just block them. I guess I could have used filters to do that, but this seems more convenient.
- swsieber 11y agoIt's definitely more convenient. That's the whole point of the feature. If anyone says this feature isn't a big deal because you can just make a filter, you're wrong. This isn't a technical feature, it's a UX feature. And having good UX makes a technical feature worth usable.
- oldmanjay 11y agoThat's a pretty good argument that this is a deal but I remain unconvinced it qualifies as "big"
- organsnyder 11y agoHope this makes its way into the Inbox app as well. That app was announced with great fanfare, but it is still missing some key features (such as composing an email to a group) that are present in the regular app.
- zyM7A6bQzJKBHnS 11y agoI would be really happy if the Inbox application had multiple accounts since I also use Fastmail and yet another account for work. But I guess the "postpone" feature would be impossible to have without access to the other servers.
- nu2ycombinator 11y agoHow is it blocking the person, when email from the person goes directly to spam? Isn't it same as marking the email from that person as spam or creating a filter to move to spam folder.
- fwn 11y agoThis will probably help Google to decide whether some email someone marked as spam is actual spam or just something the user didn't like to receive.
- empressplay 11y agoThis just seems to be the same as creating a filter. What would be really cool would be if it bounced messages from people you "blocked"... that would be something!
- mklim 11y ago> That’s why you can now block specific email addresses in Gmail [...] Future mail will go to the spam folder (and you can always unblock in Settings). It's nice to have a one-click button for it, but this was already available by configuring a filter. You just need to select all emails from a particular address and then choose to always mark them as spam or send them directly into the trash. From the headline I was thinking that they changed it so that you could keep email from an address from ever being delivered to your account in any form.
- dave5104 11y agoStill, this is an easier way to apply that filter. I've found filters to not always be that easy to set up... so I can only imagine how average users deal with them, aka probably not at all.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI wonder though if they have taken it out of the filter flow. Filters are interesting in that they can really slow things down, and if a previous one fires before the send to trash one does, sometimes it has a different result. If they have called this out as a behavior that can happen on the inbound pipeline, and more importantly if they can reflect it back as a 5xx error to the sender, it would be nice improvement.
- nattaylor 11y agoSeems like the Inbox team has rethought the filter flow at least in terms of UI and there are clearly some architecture/backend changes too. Perhaps this new "block" flow in GMail is a reflection of working together with the Inbox team.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- loteck 11y agoAny feature complicated enough to implement is indistinguishable from a missing feature. Would be interested to hear why it took so long to add this one-click functionality, which is common across clients, to Gmail. There must have been some internal disagreement on its implementation?
- dec0dedab0de 11y agoI would like it better if blocked users received undeliverable messages.
- eli 11y agoAs someone who sends email newsletters, I would definitely prefer that too. I don't want to send messages to people who don't want them or aren't going to read them.
- iridium127 11y agoAs someone who doesn't like spam, I'd rather see the spammers pay for sending the emails even if I never see them.
- VLM 11y agoYou could mailbomb someone by getting spam sent with their address as a from address. Then they'd be hellbanned from the internet and mailbombed at the same time. This could become a problem.
- iridium127 11y agoAs someone who doesn't like spam, I'd rather see the spammers pay for sending the emails even if I never see them.
- codeulike 11y agoTrue blocking is when they get a mailer-daemon bounceback though. This is more like hellbanning.
- eddd 11y agoI've seen that feature before, when I was adding email to spam. Google would then ask If I want unsubscribe from given list.
- Touche 11y agoThis is great! Any intention to standardize these with JMAP perhaps? Any FastMail employees have anything to say about these new features?
- siscia 11y agoI am trying to solve a similar problem but offering unlimited email addresses, you can block any of your address, forward some of them to your regular email, visualize all (or just some) of the addresses in the same page as they were the same address and eliminate an address so that email is undeliverable. We are in pre-beta, but if you leave your email (of course I won't spam) I will keep you up to date and I will ask your opinion :) http://mailroad.co/ http://mailroad.co/
- computer 11y agoPresumably the advantage of this over a standard filter is that blocking (hopefully!) checks SPF/DKIM and verifies that the person being blocked is actually the sender of the email. Simply blocking a From-address would not be effective.
- LukeHoersten 11y agoI wonder if these features will be available for Google Inbox on iOS.
- cdnsteve 11y agoHilton hotels, can't unsubscribe because of account login forced. This is my new fix!
- chubot 11y agoIt's amazing how many unsubscribe links, which are mandated by law, are broken or flaky. I just "report spam" now when that happens, and it totally works. No regrets.
- thomasahle 11y agoExactly, "report spam" already serves well as "block" as well as "unsubscribe".
- meesles 11y agoI can see how people get annoyed (I do), but I think this strategy is harmful to some companies. For example, I work for a web company that sends out a LOT of emails as reminders for events. ISPs (or some other web intermediary, I'm not sure) have rankings based on your likelihood to spam. A lot of spammy emails are already caught in the filter, and either don't go through or go to your spam folder. We work pretty hard to clear up misunderstandings that could harm our email rating so that users don't miss important events. That all being said, reporting spam instead of unsubscribe could hurt their email rankings in the future. Obviously I'm not talking about VIAGRA6969.NZ, but avoid the spam button if the company is respectable at all.
- benburton 11y agoI like to call this the "father in law" feature.
- SquareWheel 11y agoA bit unrelated, but Google and other companies have been using a lot more gifs in blog posts lately. I find my eyes have a harder time keeping my position in the text, and I keep losing my place/getting distracted. Any others feel the same way?
- billybilly1920 11y agoThis is unethical; You have no right to block people trying to advertise to you.
- patja 11y agoIs this very different from the same feature Hotmail has had since 2011?
- franze 11y agothat's a huge gif (embedded on the post):http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WF4v__O9Tbg/VfySrow-OPI/AAAAAAAABxI/NouiJxI7wBo/s1600/Block.gif http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WF4v__O9Tbg/VfySrow-OPI/AAAAAAAABx... -> 1.369.049 bytes (1,4 MB on disk)
- halviti 11y agoAh, finally a solution for paypal. I've unsubscribed from their mailing lists more times than I can remember.
- yuvadam 11y agoLNKD is down 1%. Related or not, either way, good riddance.
- lemevi 11y agoI deleted my linkedin account and recreated it using an email address I use for catching spam. Haven't had any emails from them since in my real inbox.
- mikestew 11y agoA nice fix for the companies that, either by malice or incompetence, use one regex for their original email field and then another for the email field used to unsubscribe. IOW, if you ordered something, used "foobar+musiciansfriend@gmail.com" (which Musician's Friend takes just fine), then went to unsubscribe, the email field regex for that screen will complain about the "+". Off to the spam bucket you go, Musician's Friend, and my purchase dollars now go to Sweetwater.
- tricolon 11y agoThat was definitely a problem with Ticketmaster. It might still be, but I've long since marked it as spam.
- friendzis 11y agoIf I recall correctly, in the early days of the Internets that used to be block (ban) and kick
- mrcactu5 11y agoI just write filters that sent directly to spam or delete. I've been doing it for years.
- mrcactu5 11y agoI just write filters that sent directly to spam or delete. I've been doing it for years.
- jebblue 11y agoThis looks great! I'd really love to see Google and Microsoft stop people from registering a new account to send spam to my accounts. If my humble Postfix/Spamassassin configuration can correctly identify them as spam; I'd expect Google and Microsoft to be able to do the same and stop those messages before they are sent, particularly when they have virus document attachments. I just got another one yesterday.
- linkregister 11y agoGmail is also the biggest source of the spam in my inbox. I'm curious if Gmail directs Gmail-to-Gmail traffic through their excellent spam filter.
- mkoryak 11y agoI've been getting 2-3 emails per year from a recruiting company. Each time I respond telling them to "REMOVE ME", but never hear back. This feature will help, but does leave me feeling like no justice has been done.
- GigabyteCoin 11y agoOne would imagine that when google receives enough block and/or unsubscribe clicks from their users that they would eventually ban that sender from contacting any gmail addresses in the future.
- fpgaminer 11y agoSpeaking of spam, the wedding industry is the worst offender I've ever seen; worse than porn websites. I've had my email address web spider-able for many years, but never seen as much spam as I have while planning a wedding. These venues and vendors take your information and sell it 2 seconds later to anyone and everyone. One venue, for example, I emailed to set up a visit and meeting. This wasn't some web form, it was me emailing them directly. Suddenly I'm subscribed to their newsletter. That was quite novel; they now rot in my spam folder. Beyond that, after all this contact with venues, vendors, and bridal shows I'm now being bombarded with email spam, text spam, and worst of all phone calls from scam artists. The last one in particular is disturbing and makes it clear that these wedding related companies are selling information like there's no tomorrow. Disgusting.
- silencio 11y agoI used a spam-only email and a google voice number to sign up for all my wedding planning-related needs. It would be unbearable otherwise. It's been two years and I still get spam _every day_ despite unsubscribing (and when available, reporting them as unsolicited). Sadly I wish I could do the same for facebook - I still get wedding planning and egg donation ads. I think a close second place goes to real estate agents. I'll inquire about something once and I end up with newsletters about seminars and houses I don't care for. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've gotten any spam from porn websites I've signed up for, at least...
- dkersten 11y agoSounds like a good candidate for foo+wedding@gmail type addresses so you know exactly who did what and then not do business there... Or at least, use a mailinator address.
- Bill_Dimm 11y agoIn a similar vein, but with physical mail, I made a donation to the local PBS TV station years ago during one of their fundraisers. They sent me a postcard with my name misspelled in a way I had never seen before. I then received solicitation mails from several other charities with the same misspelling. Nothing says "thank you for your donation" like being sold out for a few extra dollars. I never donated to them again.