Gmail "Unsubscribe" Link Lets You Stop Receiving Marketing Mails

After revamping their interface with the introduction of tabs to categorize emails, Gmail has now come up with an 'unsubscribe' button for marketing/promotional emails. Gmail account users often have had problems with unsubscribing from marketing emails due to a nano-sized 'unsubscribe' link, usually at the bottom of a mail. This feature was made available to a small percentage of users before and now will be made available to everyone starting from the coming week. The recipients won't have to take any special actions to make link appear. This change is a part of actions Gmail's 'quick action buttons' that helped users save a lot of time. The link will be placed prominently along with the name and the email address of the person who sent the mail. Once a user clicks the 'unsubscribe link', he will have to kiss all the future emails from that company a good-bye.


While this tool may appear to be a relief for users, at the same time, it can be a headache for business marketing people who want to increase their user base online. But Google said that it was trying to make its businesses more transparent by classifying marketing emails from spam mails. Vijay Eranti, who heads the anti-abuse technical team at Google said that users who want to opt out of mailing lists and can't find the unsubscribe link often mark the promotional mails as spam. If many users mark the mail as spam, the Google spam filter automatically marks the sender as a spammer. This could cause a problem in the delivery of the company's emails. Thus, frivolous online marketing for companies could now become more difficult, at least in case of Gmail users.

At the same time, Gmail announced that it was helping email marketers by beta-testing a Feedback Loop (Email) program. This service would allow Email Service Providers (ESPs) to see whether their systems were used for spamming customers or not. To participate in this project, companies are required to comply with Google's #-Link-Snipped-#.

These developments were reported by Google in front of an audience of email marketing professionals at San Francisco on Thursday. Elie Bursztein, who heads Google's anti-abuse research, marked Google's efforts to strike up a balance between customers and online marketers. Nonetheless, it will now be interesting to see how the email marketing community reacts to these decisions.

Source: #-Link-Snipped-#