Ad Lagendijk
20 October 2010
Impossible to unsubscribe
Tags: email newsletter, Journal of Chemical Physics, spam, unsubscribePosted in Efficient email, Getting published, Web 2.0
Like many of my colleagues I get tens and tens of emails per day. My estimate is that about one quarter of is spam that by definition cannot be caught by any spam filter. I really get irritated by receiving these emails. I will give a few examples that I got today: (i) a the Journal of Chemical Physics with an email containing news flashes about recent developments and (ii) the Belgian funding organization FWO with an issue of their periodical newsletter. And also the Dutch science funding organizations STW and NWO send me regularly unsolicited emails.
I already discussed this point a few weeks ago, but I am getting so much of this email stuff that I post it this time as a single post and not buried in a larger post
I never asked
I never asked to be on these email lists. How do they get my email address? Well, for instance because I was friendly and accepted a review job for a journal. And the journal punishes me immediately with this unwanted subscription to their email newsletter. Or, I applied for a grant through a web-based interface where the authentication was done through my email address. This address is certainly going to be a valid email address. And yes, after my submission I am confronted with another unwanted email newsletter.
A bona-fide commercial company that would practice this email sending would be violating many laws. Many countries require an opt-in system and not an opt-out choice, leave alone a missing opt-out option. Criminal spammers are caught by your spam filter. But in the case of my two examples I cannot ban their email domain.
Solution 1: give them a big mouth
Write them an irritated email that you do not want these emails any more. This confrontation will probably have the right effect. However, I need STW, 
NWO and the Journal of Chemical Physics for my career and for the career of my PhD students. I just cannot afford to end up having bad relations with any of them.
Solution 2: accept the burden and suffer
Given my character this is no solution for me. But perhaps it is for you.
Solution 3: use the unsubscribe option
If the organizations have some decency they should supply an unsubscribe option. Some are so convinced of their importance that they cannot imagine you would want to opt out. But suppose they supply an opt-out facility. Why not use it? Opt-out clickable links supplied in emails sent by real spammers should never be used, because you would tell these criminals that your email address is alive. But for an organization in good standing you can trust their unsubscribe option. And indeed I trust it, but in the majority of cases I cannot use it. The reason is very simple. Scientists have many email addresses because they are affiliated with more organizations, or because they have worked for other organizations in the past, and because they have addresses like gmail.
The very popular – but indeed stupid – unsubscribe facility the organizations supply is a naked mailto: link with ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject. But this unsubscribe will only work if it the unsubscribe email will be sent (SMTP) from the same mail server as the server that received (POP) the email. But that match is often not present. Any forwarded email cannot be unsubscribed by this primitive opt-out method. Some email clients like Outlook have the facility to use several SMTP servers (in other programs this is sometimes called personalitiess). But using a different personality is cumbersome and in particularly – as I have posted somewhere else, for Outlook. Part of the complication is that it is by no means simple, if not practically impossible, to trace back to which of your own addresses the spam was sent to.
Final and only correct solution:
unsubscribe with hyperlink containing query string
A professional unsubscribe method solves it all. The unsubscribe link should be a hyperlink with a query string, that is a string with starts with ” ?” . Google is using this method continuously with its search machine. Technically speaking we call this the ‘GET’ method of packaging additional information in a hyperlink. It is quite simple to package in the query string all information, including email address, that is necessary to unsubscribe a person from a newsletter. And most of all: this link will work disregarding of the location or program or web interface it was clicked and sent.
Action point for publishers and grant organization
- do not add the scientists that depend on you automatically to the list of recipients your email letters
- if you are so uncivilized to do it anyway, supply a one-click unsubscribe option that will work from any place in the world and from any program
Follow
21 Oct 2010 9:35, Suzan Verberne
Option 4: filter.
Me and my colleagues use GMail for our work email (using either forwarding or some pop3/smtp construction). GMail has excellent filtering options. Mail that comes from specific senders or is sent to specific lists (or even addresses; I have 5 or so email addresses), skips my inbox and is labelled something like ‘internal affairs’, ‘Mailinglist: xxx’ or whatever. I can see in the list of labels which labels contain unread emails but only once a week or so I browse through them to see if there is anything important there.
21 Oct 2010 10:08, Ad Lagendijk
Suzan, thanks.
But how do you unsubscribe using GMail if the unsubscribe email was not sent directly to your GMail address? The organization will only accept the unsubscribe if it was sent from the original address. I think your solution is the filtering can be very good. I think it becomes quite problematic if some of the emails from the same address you do want to receive (like “if you this we will accept your paper”) .
21 Oct 2010 10:17, suzan
Unsubscribing from lists can indeed be problematic if you use GMail to send mail from your work address (which I do). Our university fortunately also has an old-fashioned web interface for their email facilities. So, for unsubscription I log into that interface and can send the unsubscribe email.
With respect to too strict filtering: that can be a problem. I have made my filters fairly strict: mail to mailinglists is all filtered out; mail from specific senders are only filtered if certain words occur in the subject, e.g. I have a filter:
from:(faculty-admin-person) subject:(colloquium OR talk OR lecture OR meeting OR reminder)
24 Oct 2010 2:34, Sushil Mujumdar
Maybe Gmail can come up with ’smart filters’, which are trainable. You filter a few emails manually, and the smart filter learns exactly what kind of emails go into what list, and what you want to prioritise. This will avoid the need to (manually) create strings of words and OR them with several other strings.
26 Oct 2010 9:05, Suzan Verberne
@Sushil: GMail introduced this recently for the ‘Priority Inbox’ feature, for people who receive a lot of mail and don’t filter very actively. I tried it for a while but for me it was not useful because I already filter a lot myself. See http://mail.google.com/mail/help/priority-inbox.html
29 Oct 2010 7:41, Mirjam
Another hard one to control is ‘spam’ from (ex-)colleagues. Besides my personal email account, I have 3 email accounts from scientific institutions that are (still) active. On an average day I receive at least one message telling me, for instance, that someone left his turkey wrap at the reception, or something the like. Problem is that I can’t block these accounts, because I sometimes still get useful things through them…
29 Oct 2010 8:00, Suzan Verberne
@Mirjam: I have the exact same thing and I filter these messages using the list address they are sent to (not from). E.g my-department@nic.surfnet.nl or fnwi-employers@science.my-university.nl
30 Oct 2010 12:21, texnic
@Mirjam: Well, you cannot ban buses which awake you at 6 in the morning because you sometimes need them yourself. You cannot ban perfume departments in the stores that annoy you with their terrible smell because sometimes you use them yourself. You cannot ban mail2all-like institutional lists ’cause you sometimes get useful information from them. It’s like this everywhere, not just with email. We want the world to deliver only the relevant services and information; but the world consists of different people, so we have to agree to get and see and hear all that stuff we’ll never use and which annoys us for the sake of receiving 1 % that we actually need.
@suzan, @Ad: When you get an email, Gmail shows you to whom the letter was sent. If you then use the “Send mail as” function, you can reply from the address to which the email was sent. Then the stupid unsubscribe mails work. Moreover, you can enable the “Reply from the same address to which the message was sent” function. Then this works automatically for many mailing lists.
But in general I of course just agree with Ad.
31 Oct 2010 8:44, Mirjam
Ah, but you can set standards for good practice! Thus, you don’t broadcast commercials for cigarettes anymore because you don’t want people to ruin their lungs. You don’t hype a school shooting in the media because it will invite copycats. And academic employees don’t use their institution’s email services to send messages of little importance to large groups of people. It is possible to prioritize and filter the information that needs to be broadcasted! I am sure that the person who lost a sandwich at some point found out (s)he was hungry and found a good solution for that…
31 Oct 2010 9:52, texnic
@Mirjam Firstly, good practices are extremely difficult to set and even more so to follow. I am now in Germany. The cigarettes are happily advertised here on the bus-stops. Who uses buses? Children, students, elderly people. It took more than half a century to ban the TV-commercials. It will take another 50 years to ban the public advertisement of smoking altogether. How old are those institutional mailing lists? Good practices only work if the problem and the solution are clear and beneficial to the majority of those involved. For a receptionist who had to deal with that sandwich it was of significant importance. As well as for its owner. One might argue that for the rest in the institute that email was comforting—such ones make an impression of a caring institution with a family-like, cosy atmosphere. The only ones who were annoyed by it were you and other former employees. But if you are not forced to use that mailing list and only do so because it’s beneficial for you, why should they care about you? Secondly, the institutional mailing list is for those working there. You are allowed to use it but it’s not for you. It is not the same as when larger organizations like the Optical Society of America are sending dozens of reminders of the deadlines for their next event which is of no relevance to me. I am a member of OSA. This list is for me. I do want to know about their conferences. But I don’t want to receive multiple emails related to those ones which are of no interest to me. Now the questions is what could be done. Of course the best for us would be that each mail is tagged with some categories so that you could just ban all those related to “FiO 2010” upon receiving the very first of them, but not the rest of the mailing list. But OSA would probably argue that they don’t have enough resources to do such programming and would have to raise the membership dues to do this. On the other hand, you can easily do such blocking yourself with Gmail.
2 Nov 2010 7:53, Mirjam
This seems to be the perfect example where the individual apparently is incapable to decide what is important for the bigger group and therefore needs a standard as guideline (same with all sorts of laws and regulations in society). And by the way: my complaints about spam by colleagues also apply to the mailing groups at my current workplaces, not just the former ones.
2 Nov 2010 9:23, texnic
Then we probably have had different experience, I’ve been more lucky so far. But I fully agree that there should be some guidelines. When we subscribe to something, we should be clearly notified what sort of messages we can suppose to be receiving. And different sorts of messages should not be sent to the same mailing list.
20 Feb 2012 16:33, Imposible darse de baja | CIENCIA
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