You know when you’re trying out a new service, so you type in your email and password. Click Sign in, no “Don’t send me email” checkbox required. You get your verification email, and that’s it.
Then, a few days pass and you open up your email client only to see a mailbox with lots of spam mail from that site you signed up for. Sometimes it’s a random newsletter, sometimes it’s notifications about some random crap, or something you clicked on by accident and now you keep getting “helpful” reminders about. (cough cough Microsoft Rewards cough).
Salt on wounds
Just to rub salt on wounds, sometimes you get automatically added to new lists, even if you unsubscribed from some. The worst type of these emails are the ones where the sender is just a name (cough cough Supabase cough cough). This one is specially bad because it just looks like a normal email. Then you click it only to realize it was random spam.
And then, even when you are going to unsubscribe, they make sure it’s as annoying as possible, normally using segmented email lists. But, just to make it worse, when you click Unsubscribe, it only unsubscribes you from one list and you have to click the Show all lists button to find the rest.
Gmail to the rescue?
Gmail has this nice feature that lets you see all (most) email lists you are subscribed to. This feature works well, most of the time. Except when it doesn’t. This feature randomly breaks sometimes. I don’t know why.
Should we praise checkboxes?
Some websites (I wish I could say most) have a little checkbox saying something along the lines of “Receive marketing emails and important notices from X” (Hint: They’re never important).
How about you just don’t send me those, like ever? If I wanted to sign up your newsletter I would go and type my email in. I don’t care about your newsletter because I’m signing up. I haven’t even used your product yet!