Yesterday, the Gmail team announced they would be adding a feature that would allow their users to Unsubscribe from Emails simply by using a button within the interface.

This is something that many prominent figures in the industry have championed for years, such as Bill Nussey of Silverpop as they realise it’s a much more convenient way for subscriber’s to remove themselves from mailing lists without marking a probably innocent sender as a Spammer.

Bill states that ‘it will dramatically improve the ability of spam filters’, which to some extent I agree. It support Spam Filters because it’s based on what the user definitely does not want to read, instead the Spam Filter trying to guess.

But, I’m not so totally convinced. For a start, this serves as no fight against true spam, the Nigerian lottery type scams, because Google have already stated,

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.

Did you get that? ‘We won’t provide the unsubscribe option on messages from spammers’, so really this isn’t about spam in the nasty sense.

OK OK, I get it

Google want to give their users an option to unsubscribe easily. As someone who works in the Email Marketing Industry I understand why it’s important to ensure subscribers are given an easy way to Unsubscribe; reduces spam complaints.

There’s a lot of reasons a Subscriber will suddenly mark your email as spam, so long as you’ve performed all the best practises the likelihood is that it’s because they mistake the Report as Spam button as an instant unsubscribe, (not to mention people no longer trusting Unsubscribe links, them spammers know you exist then!).

If that is the case, and Google dowant to give their users an easier way of unsubscribing, why have they combined that feature with the ‘Mark as Spam’. Yo, Google, it’s possible for an email to be unsubscribed from and not thought of as spam you know?!

So, is it pointless?

Well, no! Annoyingly I can still see the sense in it, to some degree. For senders, this is still going to be able to act as the Feedback Loop (FBL) that Google never had so that we as honest and true marketers can remove subscribers from mailing lists and never mail to them again.

It’s just the approach of this feature I don’t agree with. It’s a little like taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut. If Google really do want to be able to ease the process of unsubscribing, why not implement the two features separately? On the one feature we have the ‘Auto Unsubscribe’ which will use the same method of ‘List-Unsusbcribe’ header information, while on the other feature they actually implement a proper Feedback Loop for email senders.

That’d be happy days all around, I think. What are your thought?

Tags: Google