Time to take a different approach.
Itâs unfortunate, but there are definitely some âoverly aggressiveâ, to put it mildly, companies out there.
Iâm not really talking about spam. We all get that, and of course, you should never try to unsubscribe from it.
This is about companies â technically legitimate companies â that start abusing the privilege of sending you email, and wonât stop when you ask politely.
Itâs time to get less polite.
Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!
When unsubscribe doesn't work
Make sure the email was sent after you unsubscribed. Depending on the email program or interface you use, your options to prevent messages from an unwanted sender include marking them as spam repeatedly, using an explicit âblock senderâ feature, or creating a filter or a rule to automatically delete their messages. If none of those options work for you, deleting each message as it arrives is quick and reliable.
Check the date
Before you get upset, check the date of the email youâre looking at after you unsubscribed.
If it was sent before you unsubscribed, the senderâs done nothing wrong â not yet anyway. They sent that message to you before you asked them to stop.
Apparently, itâs not uncommon to work through a long list of email in âmost recent firstâ order, unsubscribe from a mailing, and then continue to encounter older messages. Iâve heard of people getting upset because they think the messages had been sent after unsubscribing, even though they had not been. Check the date.
When you do unsubscribe, give them at least a little time to take action. Iâll generally give them a day.
But donât expect them to travel back in time. That technology doesnât exist yet, at least not that Iâm aware of.
Mark âem as spam
This is my go-to response. If someone is sending you email, especially if itâs a lot, and you follow the proper procedure to ask them to stop â meaning youâve unsubscribed â continuing to send you messages makes them a spammer. Itâs the very definition of spam: unsolicited commercial email. Once youâve said âstopâ, itâs âunsolicitedâ in my book.
In theory, if you mark something as spam often enough, the spam filter should get the message and begin routing those messages to your spam or junk folder automatically.
The problem, of course, is marking as spam doesnât always work, and it doesnât always work quickly. It depends on the email system and spam filter youâre using. Some systems seem to react well and donât take much encouragement, while others seem to completely ignore the suggestion.1
Some systems act on your personal opinion and realize that you think itâs spam. Others use the so-called âwisdom of the crowdâ and wonât start marking it as spam until a large number of other people have marked it as spam as well.
So if it works, great. Itâs my preferred solution.
If it doesnât, we need to investigate alternatives.
Block senders
This isnât available in all mail programs and isnât something I recommend for run-of-the-mill spam. However, if youâre getting spam from a consistent source â the same âFrom:â address on each message â blocking them is an option.
For example, when youâre viewing an email in Gmail, click the vertical ellipsis, and one of the options will be to âBlockâ the sender.
Now when you look at Gmail settings, in âFilters and Blocked Addressesâ youâll see a list of the email addresses that youâve blocked.
Many online email services, and some email programs, have a blocking feature. Itâs usually in their Junk Mail or Spam settings.
Remember: this only blocks a single email address. Spammers routinely change the âfromâ on all their messages, which is why blocking normal spam doesnât work. If youâre getting unwanted messages from the same source over and over, âblock senderâ is an option.
One rule to spam them
If blocking isnât an option, or you want finer control over what happens, the next solution I recommend is to set up a rule or filter in your email program or interface to automatically act on the message when it arrives.
For example, in Gmailâs âFilters and Blocked Addressesâ settings, you can Create a new filter and specify the email address on which you want it to operate.
After specifying the search criteria â in this case, the email address we wish to block â we can specify what is to happen.
Oddly enough, âMark as spamâ isnât an option in Gmail filters, so the next best thing is to automatically delete it. Many other programs and interfaces also let you mark it as spam in their filters.
I mention filters and rules because, as you can see, you have much finer control over what gets filtered (perhaps you need to see some of the emails from that address, but not others), and what happens (perhaps bypassing your inbox is enough). If blocking the sender doesnât do it for you, perhaps a more flexible filter will.
Ignore them
Iâm often amazed at how much ire spam raises. If youâre facing an uncontrolled flood every day, thatâs one thing. Hopefully, a good spam folder reduces it to a trickle.
But even with just a trickle â say a single spam message every day showing up in an inbox â Iâve people can get really, really upset. It seems like lifeâs too short to let the spammers get to you that quickly, but thatâs just me.
Unfortunately, if none of the techniques above work, or they arenât available to you, your options are few. Of course, you can get a new email address, but thatâs a tremendous amount of work and complication just to stop one problematic subscription.
My more pragmatic alternative is simply this: the delete key. Itâs fast, itâs effective, and itâs always there for you.
You deserve control
The bottom line is that whoever is sending you email and offering to unsubscribe you isnât playing by the rules when they ignore your request. If thatâs an issue for you, you need to take matters into your own hands and explore options like blocking, filters, or other techniques to get their messages out of sight.
Do this
Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.
I'll see you there!
Hi Leo â thanks as always for a helpful article. I donât know if youâre familiar with the Mailwasher programme from Firetrust, but Iâve been using it for years and it really helps to identify (and then delete and/or bounce!) unwanted emails before they even hit your machine. The idea being, of course, that if it bounces, then the spam generator will think your email address is not used, and stop sending.
Even if this doesnât work, Mailwasher will flag all suspect emails (or those youâve blacklisted) and itâs easy to quickly run down the list and make sure that the treatment of each mail is what you want. It even allows you to restore an email which has been deleted &/or bounced in the last few weeks, if you inadvertently delete one you really wanted. I routinely check mail for all 3 of my accounts through Mailwasher first, before doing send & receive.
Itâs funny. Today I marked two emails from legitimate companies. One didnât include an unsubscribe. It was a textbook company and they were ads I never signed up for. Somehow book companies think they have a God-given right to send spam to people with academic addresses. The other had an unsubscribe but I would have to have filled out a few fields to unsubscribe. Spamming them was easier. If unsubscribe requires any more than a confirmation mouse-click, they deserve to have their emails labeled as spam.
Gmail seems to do a good job of learning to recognize spam after Iâve marked them. Footnote 1 is one of the reasons I donât use my hotmail address for serious email.
Similar to what you said about books, I get SPAM E-mails all the time about becoming a guest editor for an issue of a journal. All because I published a peer reviewed paper years ago with my personal E-mail address (since I had left my employer). And looking at what you get for being a guest editor, it ainât much!
Thank you itâs awesome to learn that GMail now has a âblock senderâ option ⊠that has worked wonders for me in other email programs where the sender did not honor the âunsubscribeâ. Blocking seems to trigger some kind of rejection notice thatâs more effective than the âunsubscribeâ is. I also use the âfilterâ option, for senders that I want to receive certain kinds of communications from but not emails on other subjects. You can specify a subject or words and send those from that sender directly to the trash without being bothered by them. :)
Spam⊠a perennial problem since it was invented. Iâve rarely had this problem, and when I have, the spam button (in Gmail) has worked fine.
But i wonder if this could cause problems if a company with which I have done business starts sending promotional material with no way to block it. If I use one of these sledgehammer approaches, it would also block account-related messages. Is there any advice on how to contact a company to advise them of the problem and possibly get it fixed?
Not really. It varies dramatically from company to company.
My attitude is that any company that sends unwanted emails deserves the consequences of being marked as spam no matter how legitimate the company is. Unsolicited email is the definition of spam.
This is probably a stupid question but anywayâŠ
You mentioned unsubscribe as a first choice. I am not arguing with that. I donât want to unsubscribe. I get a lot out of your articles.
Somewhere or someone once told me to forward their articles to a friend but to delete the âunsubscribeâ link so they wouldnât inadvertently unsubscribe you.
How do you that? What is the proper procedure to break an âunsubscribeâ link or any link for that matter? Itâs easier said than done for me.
When you forward an email it doesnât directly sent the email. It first creates an email with the contents of the original email which you can edit out any thing you donât want. You can even add an introductory paragraph or three explaining why you are forwarding it etc.
How do I remove the senderâs address before forwarding an email? (You can remove more than the senderâs addressâ
When you have selected an email to forward, you should be able to edit the email before clicking on âsendâ. Highlight what you want to delete, such as an unsubscribe link, then hit delete on your keyboard. The highlighted part will be deleted. When youâre finished deleting parts of the email you do not want included, hit âsendâ.
To see if it works properly, forward an email to yourself making sure to delete the unsubscribe link first.
Iâm surprised Leo did not mention anything about the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. But then again, this article was aimed more at how to deal with repeated emails if unsubscribing does not work.
I get so much âSPAMâ through Linkeded. Especially recruiters, but I am NOT looking for a job. When I tell them that, then they try to offer to hire staff for me, which I am also not looking. This one lady, I told her several times Iâm not interested. She said âgotchaâ each time. Finally I unfriended her. She friends me again asking for 5 minute to talk about her company can help hire for me. I have reported to Linkedin as SPAM and blocked her now, but it is frustrating.
I was getting frequent emails from a large, reputable company with whom i had done business twice. On both occassions they had let me down badly. I tried unsubscribing several times with no luck, until I finally decided to write to their head office. I threatened to report them to both their ISP and to Watchdog (a consumer TV show here in the UK) if they didnât remove me from their mailing list by the end of the next business day. It workedâŠ
From way back, I found that clicking the âUnsubscribeâ link usually works to the site I do not want, BUT, within a few days, I start getting a ba-zillon spam mails from everywhere else, even if I have never been to the sitesâŠ.
Blocking or marking as spam works for a while, then it starts again, with different sites. I usually advise clients do not use unsubscribe link, as I would see the same issue over and overâŠ
Seems once unsubscribed to a site, your good address is sent to the âNational Database of Spamâ. (NDS)
Just my feelings on the spam industryâŠâŠ.
If unsubscribing gets you more spam, it means you are unsubscribing from a spam email or the increase in spam was just a coincidence. Unsubscribing from a legitimate company wonât get you spam.
One extreme way to get a âlegitimateâ companyâs attention is to post on Twitter including their handle and simply ask: âWhy wonât [@company] honor my request to stop sending me unwanted email.â This has worked several times for me.
Years ago, when I started using Thunderbird for my email, I set up a filter to mark all emails as spam, if the sender is not in my address book. It works really nicely to keep by inbox clean with only emails Iâm interested in.
Iâve found that with most email providers and email programs, when you mark an email as spam, the spam filter blocks the sender and all the email from them will go to the spam folder. That may be why Gmail doesnât give you the option to send it to spam. Also, when I want to block a specific sender, Iâm just as happy to have it go directly to Trash. That way, I donât have to review it in my spam folder for false positives.
I was really annoyed to find this statement in the Doordash privacy policy as I was about to sign up today, and am very surprised they can presumably get away with this: âPlease note that even if you opt-out, you may still receive advertisements from us.â What the heck?!!? Grubhub has no such statement, so I am signing up with them instead.
I mark any advertising email I didnât specifically ask for as spam.
Spam: âirrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.â
As an exception, I donât mark as spam email from companies which I might have to do business with later, so I can receive order related emails.
The problem with simply âdeletingâ unwanted email is one of the biggest reasons I unsubscribe from a list is âsending too many emails.â I had one sender (with something like a dozen different lists) that I âunsubscribed allâ six times in as many months; I finally sent a nastygram to a different department and told them nothing was happening there when they tried to redirect me to the âaccount preferencesâ page. Now Iâve got another account that hasnât sent me anything worthwhile in nearly a year, and theyâve ignored three unsubs so far, even though Iâve given them the week they asked for to update their lists.
Donât unsubscribe from spam. Those unsubscribe links are there to let them know your email address is valid and can be sold to other spammers. Itâs fine to use unsubscribe links from legitimate companies.