Gmail has rolled out a feature to try and streamline the process. Now, when you click the “Report Spam” button on an email, you’ll get an “Unsubscribe and report spam” option that will actually remove you from the mailing list as opposed to simply moving the email to your spam folder. Gmail also says that this doesn’t work for everything yet, and when I tried it on a couple of newsletters in my mailbox, I didn’t see the option. They are trying to get more senders to support the feature.
More details on their blog:
“We’re actively encouraging senders to support auto-unsubscribe — we think 100% should. We won’t provide the unsubscribe option on messages from spammers: we can’t trust that they’ll actually unsubscribe you, and they might even send you more spam. So you’ll only see the unsubscribe option for senders that we’re pretty sure are not spammers and will actually honor your unsubscribe request. We’re being pretty conservative about which senders to trust in the beginning; over time, we hope to offer the ability to unsubscribe from more email.”
It’s a nice feature from Gmail, but the problem seems to be with the email senders, who automatically opt you into mailing lists and make it intentionally difficult to remove yourself. Unfortunately, that’s not something that’s likely to change anytime soon, but I must say, good try Google :).
