About Google’s Auto Unsubscribe from Spam Service   - 560 Views, 1 Comment

Here’s how it works: when you click on “report spam” for a particular piece of email, from within Gmail, the Gmail system notes that you think that particular email is spam, and does a couple of things with it. First, it puts it into your spam folder. Second, it notes that you consider that email spam, and if enough other users consider that same email (or email from that same sender) to be spam, Gmail may start putting that email into the spam folder automatically.

Now, this is how Gmail has always worked. What’s new is the offer to auto-unsubscribe you from that sender’s mailings. Here’s how this looks - when you click on “report spam” for some (but not all) senders, you will get a pop-up that looks like this:

Clicking on “Unsubscribe and report spam” will cause Gmail to send an unsubscribe request on your behalf to the sender of the email which you are reporting.

Again, this is in place only for some, but not all, senders. Why not all?

Explains Google, “This only works for some senders right now. We’re actively encouraging senders to support auto-unsubscribe — we think 100% should. We won’t provide the unsubscribe option on messages from spammers: we can’t trust that they’ll actually unsubscribe you, and they might even send you more spam. So you’ll only see the unsubscribe option for senders that we’re pretty sure are not spammers and will actually honor your unsubscribe request. We’re being pretty conservative about which senders to trust in the beginning; over time, we hope to offer the ability to unsubscribe from more email.”

If you’re a sender, wanting to have Google auto unsubcribe people who report you as spamming, Google offers this advice: “For those of you senders who are interested in this feature, the most basic requirements are including a standard “List-Unsubscribe” header in your email with a “mailto” URL and, of course, honoring requests from users wishing to unsubscribe. You’ll also need to follow good sending practices, which in a nutshell means not sending unwanted email (see our bulk sending guidelines for more information).”

What there isn’t is an “unsubscribe and don’t report as spam” option. So if you actually asked to be put on the mailing list, please don’t take the easy way out and click on something that will erroneously report the mailing as spam when it actually isn’t. Instead, take a moment to go to the bottom of the email, and unsubscribe through the mailing list itself.