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1737 points pseudolus | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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Uehreka ◴[] No.41860626[source]
When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.

There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the link) I’m either immediately unsubscribed from the person who sent me the email, or I’m taken to a page which seemingly MUST have a “remove me from all emails” option.

The level of compliance (and they can’t even do malicious compliance!) with this is absurd. If these new rules work anything like that, they’ll be awesome. Clearly regulating behavior like this is indeed possible.

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1. yawaramin ◴[] No.41860883[source]
Uh, email unsubscribe links started out great but are now really bad unfortunately :'-( The mailers do all sorts of tricks to make it really difficult to ubsubscribe. Eg, you think you subscribed to one newsletter but they actually subscribe you to many different actual subscriptions with your email address, and give them slightly different names, like 'XYZ News', 'XYZ Updates', 'Stay in touch with XYZ'. Then you are forced to unsubscribe from each of these one by one, and you don't even know if you got them all; there could be more that they could spring on you later.

There are now email unsubscribe services, but they don't really work either: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-email-unsubs...