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.

So I'm getting these emails from the KamalaHarris campaign. They're signed by the domain as well. I've never given money to the organiation, I'm not connected with their party, I've never signed up for the campaign, or interacted with them. However, I'm constantly being put on their mailing list soliciting for donations.

I've seen how the campaigns pass around email addresses without consent. (Mostly from ActBlue) So I'm concerned about validating an email address via unsubscribe.

I've reported this to abuse at sendgrid, and now sparkpostmail. They're shopping for email services.

Proof of org spamming:

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; dkim=pass header.i=@e.kamalaharris.com header.s=ak01 header.b=kJamWIyP; spf=pass (google.com: domain of bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com designates 168.203.32.245 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com; dmarc=pass (p=REJECT sp=REJECT dis=NONE) header.from=e.kamalaharris.com

Unfortunately political parties have more of a free pass on this as Republicans sued providers for their emails getting caught up in spam filters around 2022 (Who would've thought continuosly emailing people who click unsubscribe on your emails who then start reporting as spam would get you put on spam lists). Now political parties (and some bulk providers) have special tools to bypass rejection with some providers as a compromise.

I'm actually amazed at this because it seems to be the first time he Democrats are actually taking advantage of all the loopholes the Republicans made, rather than trying to take the high road.

I received well over 1000 SMS messages in 2020 from the Biden campaign. Replying 'STOP' worked... for that one number but since they were using a huge army of volunteers to SMS out messages, asking them to stop was pointless as there was a seemingly endless number of others sending out messages. Legal or not, it wasn't ethical. It only started after I updated my voter registration because I moved between counties. The online form had telephone number as a mandatory field but I didn't realize that would be released to political campaigns.

Trump and Biden both spammed my physical mailbox with the usual slick mailers, though the Biden campaign had an interesting twist in that I kept getting what appeared to be hand written postcards from people in metro Atlanta where I lived but every single one of those post cards was postmarked San Francisco. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and think maybe the postcards were written in bulk by the actual people in the Atlanta area and then sent to some Biden associated organization in SF, who then paid the postage for all the individual postcards to go out.