Still looking for something to use for my primary email address. This should be easy to do -- my law, every bulk email must have an unsubscribe message, and it would seem easy to write something that searches for these, and gives you a list.
Conservative. Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
Email complaints/requests about copyright infringement to clayton @ claytoncramer.com. Reminder: the last copyright troll that bothered me went bankrupt.
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Friday, December 28, 2012
Unsubscribing From Junk Mailers
I am frustrated at the amount of spam that shows up -- even if it goes to the Spam folder. There is one service that works with gmail.com and Yahoo mail accounts called unroll.me that gives you some control over your subscriptions, and makes it pretty painless to unsubscribe from subscriptions that you no longer want, or sometimes never wanted.
I saw a lifehacker post recently that advised just searching on the word "unsubscribe" in the general in-box. By golly, that works well for finding subscription emails or companies that think you have consented to establishing a relationship with them.
ReplyDeleteThen a search on the page for the same word, and a click, and after the odd half of clicking you've cleaned up incoming mail for some time.
That's what I am doing, but a more automated process (especially with the quantity of spam that I get) would be nice.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately a lot of Spammers use "Unsubscribe" messages as proof of a valid e-mail address for... you guessed it, MORE Spam.
ReplyDeleteDon't expect ethical behavior from spammers, and remember the two Rules of Spam.
1. Spammers Lie.
2. If a spammer appears to be telling the truth, see Rule 1.
Unless you actually do subscribe to a lot of email lists, the "unsubscribe" idea is better as a filter - anything with the word unsubscribe in the message body is automatically diverted, unless you've specifically whitelisted it.
ReplyDeleteLegitimate companies that send you marketing emails every week after you made one purchase likely will honor the unsubscribe requests, but the rest won't.