Gmail tip: the “unsubscribed” tag
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I get a lot of acquaintance spam. Companies I once dealt with keep sending me stuff I don’t want. Websites where I signed up for an account years ago keep telling me stuff I don’t care about. There are people in Ottawa, Canada, who still seem to think I want to know about the local yacht club’s race schedule even though I left the country years ago. And sometimes I have memberships with organisations who I still want to stay with, but I just don’t want them cluttering up my inbox all the time.
So, whenever I get these emails I click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom, or email the address specified, or whatever’s necessary to stop getting these emails.
And sometimes, later, I get another email from the same organisation and think, “Huh, didn’t I already unsubscribe from this?” And then I click again. And again, and again.
Since I switched to Google Mail I’ve come up with a new way of handling this: Every time I try to unsubscribe from acquaintance spam, I add the “unsubscribed” tag to the message and then archive it. And, if I get an unsubscribe confirmation, I tag that the same way.
Next month, if I get another spam from them, I just go see whether it’s already in the “unsubscribe” folder. And if it is, I start getting snarky:
Dear WidgetCo,
This is the third time I have attempted to unsubscribe from your mailing list. I previously attempted it on June 3rd and July 2nd of this year, with apparent success, and yet you keep sending me email.
This unsolicited email is most likely in contravention of your ISP and/or hosting providers’ spam policies.
Kindly remove me from your mailing list forthwith, and never trouble me again!
I’ve managed to get off a couple of tricky lists this way. But if it does get to the point where I want to whine to their ISP or hosting provider about unsolicited commercial email, I’ve got a paper trail. I just search for “label:unsubscribed widgetco” to immediately bring up the list of previous unsubscribe attempts.
Of course, there’s nothing about this that’s particularly Gmail-specific. If you use any other email system, you could probably set up a folder or otherwise tag your messages in a similar way.
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