Email is good.

Alex LaFroscia, via email:

It seems like these days, more and more “unsubscribe” links result in a URL that is, apparently, invalid. I often click those links just to find that Safari rejects the URL as being inaccessible in some way. I’ve tried to disable my adblocker to determine if the issue is on my end, and from what I can tell it’s not that. Do you have a sense of what’s happening here? IS the issue on my end, or is this a new dark pattern at work to keep people from unsubscribing? If you run into these yourself, how do you handle them? Simply marking them as “Spam” doesn’t feel like enough!

Not a lawyer or expert on laws, but my understanding is that CAN-SPAM makes it illegal to have a missing or non-functional unsubscribe link. It’s likely not much of a relief, but some sending is actually doing that, it is breaking the law, at least in the U.S. It was smart to check the ad blocker situation, as I can easily imagine unwanted email coming from a domain that is blocked by an adblocker for being… unwanted. Should your browser (or whatever network blocking you are doing) block those domains, then unsubscribing may appear to be broken when it’s really just you blocking yourself.

I’ve struggled with this plenty in other ways. Sometimes, an unwanted email isn’t actually “spam”, it’s just an email that you’d have rather not gotten. And if an email is actual spam sometimes it doesn’t feel right to actually use that unsubscribe link because it could be literally counter-productive, letting them know you’re a real live person.

Generally…

• If the email is just some marketing crap you’d rather not get, I’d hit that unsubscribe button and hope it works.
• If the unsubscribe URL legit fails, then I’d mark as spam.
• If the URL is legit spam, mark as spam.
• If things are getting through that you otherwise feel powerless to prevent, use a filter.

My general thesis is that if you keep up with this fight over time, eventually your inbox is generally pretty clean, and the fight doesn’t seem so overwhelming to keep fighting.