One subscription should equal one unsubscription

One of the side effects of using tagged addresses to sign up for things is seeing exactly what companies do with your data once they get it.

For instance, 3 years ago I downloaded a white paper or something from an ESP. That white paper was apparently co-branded and the other company got my email address from the ESP. They’re now sending mail to that address. I unsubscribed from the ESP mail and haven’t gotten anything from them in the last 2 1/2 years.

There are multiple problems with this kind of sharing. The first is that recipients don’t know they’re giving permission for their data to be shared. Maybe it was in the fine print, but hiding permission in terms and condition isn’t real permission.

Compounding the spam is the fact that I only gave one group my email address, but I have to unsubscribe multiple times. To me, this is the same as unsubscribing from one email only to have a sender add me to a different list of theirs.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the only fair way to handle subscriptions in a truly opt-in fashion is that the number of unsubscribes necessary to stop mail should equal the number of subscribes. In my case it’s easy. Every subscription gets a unique address. When I give my address in one place, then I should be able to stop all mail to that address through a single unsubscribe.

I’m not against preference centers. If you want to add me to multiple segments or lists, all you have to do is tell me and let me choose. If you can’t do that, then take an unsubscribe request as a request to remove me from all mail. If you’re in the US, you’re required to do that under CAN SPAM and other laws.

No recipient should have to chase down every company their addresses have been shared with just to opt-out. Companies that share opt-ins for addresses should also share opt-outs. If that’s too much work for you, then how is it any less work for the recipient? You know who you’ve given the address to, I don’t. I just get to unsubscribe any time someone decides to mail the address of mine you gave them.

Otherwise, it’s all just spam.

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Want some history?

I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which are still true and even relevant.

From a historical perspective, the footnotes are the real meat of the document. Professor Sorkin discusses many different cases that together establish the rights of ISPs to filter mail, some of which I wasn’t aware of. He also includes links to then-current news articles about filtering and spam. He also mentions different websites and articles written by colleagues and friends from ‘back in the day’ discussing spam on a more theoretical level.
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