Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

"Include a clearly marked unsubscribe link in the message body"

Gmail truncates mails at a really small limit for some dumb reason so many times this isn't visible without extra steps of expanding to the full mail.

Direct from Google: https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentica...

Maybe that unsubscribe link should be at the top then. Interested readers will move past it quickly. People held hostage or cajoled into enrolling will find it quickly.

Are you mad at the right party?

> Gmail’s AI-powered defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam

How to lie with statistics :). It's not hard to block all spam if you chuck anything you're not sure about in with the false positives. It's not that Gmail is so much better, it's that they have to care less because everyone has to deal with their dominance on the market

Edit: reading further

> By February 2024, Gmail will start to require that bulk senders:

> 1. Authenticate their email

That is already the case, as evidenced by that the blog post links to an existing help article of theirs to an existing error code that I have indeed encountered as a sender. They mention having rolled this out last year, which fits the timeline on my side.

> 2. Enable easy unsubscription

That has long been required by law. Did they not factor this in yet?!

> 3. [Stay below] a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under to ensure Gmail recipients aren’t bombarded with unwanted messages. This is an industry first

Here we go, this is the meat. So if someone wants to annoy you, they can sign up for your newsletter and hit the spam button and everyone will stop receiving all email from your site (such as signup confirmations, password resets... you're basically out of business).

Users do not understand the spam button is meant for spam, not for anything they don't want to receive anymore, which is why it's so useful to have an unsubscribe button in the UI that actually works, but Gmail doesn't show that (see my other comment in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37773525).

"Industry first" indeed... few others have the market power to demand these sorts of things and require senders to spend (wo)manpower on manually resolving delivery issues for individual receivers. If a random ISP would start doing this, the people at that ISP would just get mad that email often does not arrive. With Google, who is going to blame Google? Clearly the site you're signing up on is broken.

I'm pretty sure that Gmail has support for the `List-Unsubscribe` mechanism [1] which provides email clients with a standardized way for a recipient to unsubscribe from the list with a button-click.

I can't quickly find any documentation about this from Google directly, confirming whether they support it, but there are a lot of 3P websites discussing it. It's kind of frustrating that Google's announcement [2] explicitly mentions one-click unsubscribes, without actually explaining (or linking to) what specific technologies they're talking about:

> Enable easy unsubscription: You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to stop receiving unwanted messages from a particular email sender. It should take one click. So we’re requiring that large senders give Gmail recipients the ability to unsubscribe from commercial email in one click, and that they process unsubscription requests within two days. We’ve built these requirements on open standards so that once senders implement them, everyone who uses email benefits. emphasis mine)

That paragraph certainly evokes the idea of `List-Unsubscribe` to me, but it'd be nice to know for sure; and to know what if anything specifically sends need to do to be compatible with Gmail.

(Note that I don't think this removes the need for the email body to include an unsubscribe link, since a recipient can't be presumed to be using a client that supports it.)

[1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt [2] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentica...