That unsubscribe time of year

Like many people, I make purchases online. This usually means the vendor adds me to their mailing list. I normally don’t care, that mail all filters to my “commercial” folder (my own personal version of tabs) and I can browse it at my leisure.
At this time of year, though, email marketers go into a bit of overdrive and that folder fills with 20 – 30 or more emails a day. The volume is no so much of a problem, but it can get annoying to try and find mail I want in all the crud from random vendors.
In some cases, I don’t even know who the company is or why they have my address. Today’s example was a florist in Maryland. Eventually I figured out I’d purchased from them back in 2007 to send flowers to a colleague when her mother passed away. Apparently, they’re doing so badly they need every dollar they can find.
What it does mean, though, is that I unsubscribe from more mail in December than I do through the rest of the year. I don’t mind the occasional mail, even weekly is no big deal. But when that frequency drastically increases, or someone has not bothered to mail me for 5+ years, I just don’t want that mail anymore.
Dana Perino used the term ‘unsubscribe Tuesday‘

Yesterday was Cyber Monday & today is Unsubscribe Tuesday.Take a chill, marketers!.

For me, that Tuesday is extending into all of December.

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New unsubscribe methods in the news

The folks at The Daily Show, who brought us the wonderful term “High Volume Email Deployer” so very long ago, are once again leading the way in new unsubscribe technology. Unsubscribe by television.

Meanwhile, the folks at The Daily Mash have a different unsubscribe suggestion.

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Unsubscribing from spam, part 2

Yesterday I posted about why the reasons a lot of people give for not unsubscribing from spam are mostly wrong. Unsubscribing from spam doesn’t seem to confirm your address and it doesn’t seem to increase your spam load.
But does that mean you should unsubscribe from spam? I’m not sure about that.
I’ve been working on a project where I am unsubscribing from every message coming into one of my email addresses. Weeks into that process I’m not seeing a huge decrease in the amount of mail that address is receiving. In some cases I’m unsubscribing from the same senders multiple times a day and have been for close to 3 weeks.
While unsubscribing doesn’t increase your spam, I’m also not sure it decreases your spam, either. But I’ll have full data and numbers demonstrating that in a few more weeks.
What can have an effect on the amount of spam you get is complaining about spam, at least according to Brian Krebs.

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Logging in to unsubscribe

I have been talking with a company about their unsubscribe process and their placement of all email preferences behind an account login. In the process, I found a number of extremely useful links about the requirements.
The short version is: under the 2008 FTC rulemaking senders cannot require any information other than an email address and an email preference to opt-out of mail. That means senders can’t charge a fee, they can’t ask for personal information and they can’t require a password or a login to unsubscribe.
I’ve talked about requiring a login to unsubscribe in the past here on the Word to the Wise blog.
Let them go
Questions about CAN SPAM
One click, two click, red click, blue click
How not to handle unsubscribes
I’m not the only person, though, that’s written about this.
The FTC has written about it in the FTC CAN SPAM Compliance Guide for business

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