If you are like me, you probably get a ton of emails that aren't quite spam but you don't want either. It seems like any time I want to get to something interesting I have to "sign up" for their newsletter first.
Most email newsletters come with a message at the end, usually in microscopically small fine print, on how to unsubscribe. It's actually required under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
I use Microsoft Outlook to read my emails. One of the security settings I have is to NOT automatically download images unless the sender is on my safe sender list. So a lot of buttons you might normally see that say unsubscribe are just a white box with a red x to me.
In other words, it's a pain to unsubscribe.
If they aren't too frequent, I'll just delete the offending email. If they get to be too much of a pain, I click on the Junk Mail button and let Outlook route them automatically to my Junk E-mail folder where they get deleted. I wonder how many of the 247 billion emails are sent each day in 2009 (according to The Radicati Group) are simply emails people haven't bothered to unsubscribe from. That same report says 81% are considered spam. Think how much faster your YouTube video might download if it weren't sharing bandwidth with all that unnecessary email!
The solution comes from Jamie Siminoff, the same person who founded PhoneTag (Tech Bit 11), my absolutely favorite voice mail application that transcribes my voice mails and emails them to me.
It is called unsubscribe.com. It works with all the major web based email systems, such a Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail. It also works as an add-in to my Microsoft Outlook (2007 and 2010 versions). If you that 3% of the universe not using one of those email options, you can always forward your unwanted emails to mail@unsubscribe.com.
You start by creating an account on unsubscribe.com. They use a "fremium" model, so low volume users are free, if you want to unsubscribe from more than 5 email lists a month, you can upgrade to the Pro version for $19.95 per year (at least for now, the website says it will go up to $49.95 eventually).
Then, if you have Gmail or Outlook, you download and install a button. Yahoo should have a button option by the time this article gets published. AOL and Hotmail are scheduled to get their buttons by the end of the year (in the meantime you use the forward to mail@unsubscribe.com option).
In my case, when I have an unwanted email I click on the unsubscribe button and that's it. The unwanted email gets deleted and unsubscribe.com takes care of the rest. I can get notified of what unsubscribe did for me once a day, a week, or never.
For a large percentage of emails, the unsubscription process is pretty simple, follow a link to a website and confirm you do indeed want to unsubscribe. There are a few people who try to make it as hard as possible to get off their list. So what does unsubscribe do then? It passes your request off to a human (presumably in a low labor cost country) to have them manually do the unsubscription.
My only complaint with unsubscribe is that it only took me about an hour to reach my 5 email limit and need to upgrade. But then, I've had the same email address for 11 years so I'm sure I'm on more lists than the average email user.
Frankly $19.95 per year is a small price to pay for something that makes me a whole lot more productive--both getting off a list in the first place and from not looking at marginal email newsletters in the future. This might be very bad news for people who market via email.
