{"id":236,"date":"2009-08-19T07:50:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T12:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/2009\/08\/a-standard-i-would-use-auto-unsubscribe.html"},"modified":"2009-12-27T21:35:49","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T02:35:49","slug":"standard-i-would-use-auto-unsubscribe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/standard-i-would-use-auto-unsubscribe.html","title":{"rendered":"A Standard I Would Use: Auto Unsubscribe"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t get a lot of spam, at least not in the traditional sense of “unsolicited commercial email”. But I do get a lot of solicitations from online retailers with whom I have done business. As we all know, even a single order can trigger weekly emails. Multiply that by all places I do business with, and I end up with a lot of unwanted emails.<\/p>\n

Certainly, the vast majority of these companies offer an unsubscribe option, with instructions clearly marked at the bottom of the email. These instructions tend to have a URL which I click and one of three things happen:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Link automatically unsubscribes me<\/li>\n
  2. Link takes me to a web page that asks for confirmation and maybe a little survey, or a list of mailings which I can opt-in or out of.<\/li>\n
  3. Link takes me to a login page, where I need to remember my login id, navigate to a profile and perform several other steps before I can unsubscribe. I have some mailing lists that I have never been able to unsubscribe to at all. I end up defining inbox rules to delete the mailings altogether.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The idea for a standard is this: Can we encode these unsubscribe mechanisms, or at least the first two mechanisms, in a standard way in the mail message itself, so that an email client can allow the user to simply push a button and activate the unsubscribe procedure? If done right, I could even be in my inbox view and select several emails and unsubscribe to those lists all at once. Ideally no further user interaction would be required. And certainly I want to avoid the requirement to hunt through an email for the unsubscribe link.<\/p>\n

    Since emails can come in a variety of formats, from text, to HTML to RTF, it might make sense to handle this in the mail headers rather than the email body itself.<\/p>\n

    Of course, we want this to be simple and declarative and not require general-purpose scripting support, for simplicity and security reasons.<\/p>\n

    I think this would be a relatively simple standard to create. We just need some conventions for an email to declare a RESTful API for unsubscribing to a list.<\/p>\n

    Of course, maybe there is something like this already out there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I don’t get a lot of spam, at least not in the traditional sense of “unsolicited commercial email”. But I do get a lot of solicitations from online retailers with whom I have done business. As we all know, even a single order can trigger weekly emails. Multiply that by all places I do business […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-standards","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}