I was just chatting with Dave today about what a shit situation it is that there are some many companies that use dark patterns to subscribe you to marketing lists, or just straight up do it. You shouldn’t get emailed for life because you bought some novelty whisky glasses at a gift shop on vacation.
I was a little more lenient that Dave was. I don’t mind a marketing email, especially if it was clear during checkout that was going to happen and I could opt-out. But of course if I unsubscribe later, it should be one-click and easy, which many companies fail at.
The situation of getting marketing emails that are impossible to unsubscribe is horribly obnoxious and I’d bet one of the reasons people grow to hate email. There is no easy recourse for this. You can “mark as spam”, which may or may not help. Beyond that, you’ll have to set up an email filter to stop them, which is a step most will never do. (I think it’s worth doing.)
But there are other technological solutions, including being proactive up-front. One-off emails is one such solution. Joshua Wold reminds about Apple’s iCloud feature for this:
… instead of trusting this company, I used Hide My Email and iCloud auto generated a new one-off email address for me.
As expected the first email popped into my inbox, cheerful, stummed to the brim with marketing, and ready to beg me for money.
I gave them a chance and unsubscribed.
They did not honor my request, of course. A day later another email popped in, as pretentious as ever. This time I was able to take back a little control. I went into iCloud and disabled that temporary email.
If you aren’t into Apple doing this for you, there is always that trick with the + sign in Gmail, in case you happen to use that.
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