FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

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.

Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent.

The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually.

They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.

Sounds more like non-compliance than a workaround, banking on their alumni being more forgiving to it. ;-)

In 2015, I somehow got subscribed to the Rensselaer School of Architecture Alumni mailing list on my personal email. I didn't go to RPI, I had never shown any interest in RPI, I don't even know anyone who went to RPI, and I had graduated from a different university about five years earlier.

I would get two or three emails a month from them, and I would click unsubscribe every time. The emails would continue. Finally, in 2018, I got the "We're sorry to see you go" unsubscribe confirmation email.

Then about three months ago, I started getting emails from the Rensselaer Office of Annual Giving. But this time it was to my work email, not my personal email. How would they get my work email address?

I have no idea how this happened, but I suspect universities play fast and loose with their mailing lists for exactly the reason you said. It's obnoxious.