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.

Until the link tries to redirect through their click tracking service, and is blocked by my firewall. Really dislike that

Imo it should be a single header that points to a url that accepts a post payload. Email clients could then surface the link

There is already a header for that: List-Unsubscribe with the URL, and the List-Unsubscribe-Post to support one-click unsubscribes, which Google and Yahoo began enforcing for bulk senders in February this year.