“You have successfully unsubscribed from our newsletter. We are sorry to see you go. Please note that it may take up to 10 days for your request to be processed. You may still receive emails during that time.”
Unsubscribe message from every email newsletter you’ve signed up for
Translation: We hope this bullshit 10-day period will make you forget you unsubscribed, so that you don’t get mad when we don’t actually unsubscribe you.
The above, from Rafael Torres on Tumblr, is precisely why I no longer unsubscribe from anything, I just make a Gmail filter to delete the message as soon as it arrives.
No hoops to jump through, no confirmation required. Poof! Gone!
Most of the time I filter on the From: line, because almost all of those newsletters now come with a footer or header asking you to add newsletter@sketchydomain.com to your “white list” or address book. They don’t want their newsletter accidentally ending up in your Spam folder. That’s the address that you want to make sure is in the “From:” spot in the Create a Filter page on Gmail.
This is a good solution but not a great solution.
It doesn’t cost them anything more to start sending out two emails: one from the old “From:” line and one from another. Or they could sell your email address.
A better solution would be to filter the email address that the email is delivered to rather than sent from.
Various solutions to this have cropped up, including OtherInbox which gives you a free (limited) domain such as @you.otherinbox.com. OtherInbox will let you have email delivered to any email address at your personal domain and will automatically filter each of them. So you could have ebay@you.otherinbox.com and amazon@you.otherinbox.com and so on. If you decided that you don’t want to accept email at any of these addresses, just click a box and voilà!
OtherInbox needs to make money, however, so they place some limits on the service, and make other features available for a fee.
The biggest drawback for me is that I had to remember to check my OtherInbox mailbox, and it wasn’t Gmail.
You should be able to use a “+” with any Gmail address, such as tj+sketchydomain@gmail.com and filter using that. Unfortunately, in practice there are two drawbacks to this method:
- It is easy for them to just drop the +sketchydomain and spam you directly
- Many, many, many web forms will not accept a “+” in an email address, even though they should
I eventually decided to make my own solution, using the idea from OtherInbox along with Google Apps (not Gmail).
I’ve written about quitting Gmail for Google Apps. When I setup my email with Google Apps, I setup two main email addresses:
- A default email that I use for communicating with real people
- A “newsletters” account, which accepts email sent to any address (commonly referred to as a “Catch-all”)
Now when I have to give my email address, I can use sketchydomain@example.com and from that point on I can start filtering messages sent to that email address. (I can also post email addresses on webpages and find out who scrapes web pages for email addresses.)
The last real key to this equation was figuring out how to accurately filter email sent to a specific address.
Your first instinct is probably to just put sketchydomain@example.com in the To: part of Create a Filter, but that will not catch all messages sent to that address. All someone has to do is put your email address in the BCC line or as part of a mailing list and that email address won’t appear at all.
To catch all messages sent to a Gmail/Google Apps address, you want to use a little-known search filter called deliveredto: which Google describes as
Search for messages within a particular email address in the Delivered-To line of the message header
Example: deliveredto:username@gmail.comMeaning: Any message with username@gmail.com in the Delivered-To: field of the message header (which can help you find messages forwarded from another account or ones sent to an alias).
The Delivered-To: can’t be spoofed by the person who sent the message.
It can’t be left out.
To filter on the “Delivered-To:” field you use “deliveredto:” (note the absence of the “-”) and put the email address after it in the “Has the words” section of the “Create a Filter” dialog.
Click “Test Search” to see what messages that it would match.
Then just create a filter to delete any new messages which are sent to that address.
And suddenly your “10 day waiting period” has been reduced to 10 seconds. If your email address is ever sold to another company, they will use the same address, and it too will get filtered. If you ever decide that you do want to get their newsletter again, just delete the filter. (HAHAHAHAHA… no, really, it could happen…)